EUDR rubber geolocation — TRACES-ready, without rejections

Smallholder rubber data, cleaned

Rubber supply chains mean many small plots from many tappers, often as points with a declared hectarage. DDSpass validates each plot, standardises country codes, and checks that plots sit inside the declared country and on land — the silent errors that cause rejected or wrong declarations.

Points and polygons, the EUDR way

A plot over 4 ha must be sent as a mapped field boundary, not a single point (EUDR Art. 2(28)). DDSpass flags oversized points, closes unclosed rings, drops altitude values and standardises the country code — then exports one combined file or one per producer. Nothing is uploaded.

The same tapping plot, submitted twice

Rubber reaches an exporter through dealers, agents and collection stations, and the same tapping plot is often reported by more than one of them. TRACES imports both copies without a word — it never tests whether two production places cover the same ground — and the declaration then claims those hectares twice.

DDSpass runs an overlap check across the plots in the file, flagging boundaries that overlap, exact duplicates, and plots sitting inside a neighbour. A connected group can be merged into one boundary in a click, with the area recomputed from the merged shape rather than copied from the first plot.

The check compares plots within the file you drop, so consolidate the dealer lists first and validate after — the double-counting then surfaces before the DDS does.

Points with a declared hectarage — where they break

Most smallholder rubber arrives as one GPS point with a hectarage typed beside it. That is fine up to 4 hectares; above it, Art. 2(28) requires a mapped boundary and a point will not do, however carefully the area was measured. What quietly goes wrong on such a list:

• "Area": "3" written as text rather than a number — TRACES reads it as 0 hectares.
• A point with no Area at all — the system silently fills in 4 hectares.
• Latitude and longitude the wrong way round — the plot renders off the world map or in another country.
• A mis-cased key such as productionplace — the whitelist is case-sensitive, so the value is ignored.

Where suppliers do hold boundaries, a spreadsheet can carry them: put WKT or GeoJSON geometry in a column and DDSpass builds real polygons from it, with the lat/lon point as a per-row fallback. That is the only way a spreadsheet meets the over-4-ha rule — see Excel to TRACES.

One file per dealer, or one for the lot

A rubber declaration is usually assembled from many producers under one exporter. DDSpass exports either a combined file (Type II) or one per producer (Type I), grouped on ProducerName plus ProducerCountry, to match how your DDS is structured.

Country codes are normalised to ISO2 on the way out — UK becomes GB, EL becomes GR — and every feature keeps its own country, which matters when an agent's list mixes origins. Note that only the top-level Import button reads the country from the file; Add production place → Import GeoJSON does not.

Each supplier whose data needed correcting gets a plain-language fix report in one of seven languages (EN, ES, PT, FR, DE, NL, DA). Validation and on-screen fixes are free, and no file is uploaded.

Questions

Is natural rubber covered by the EUDR?

Yes. Rubber is one of the seven EUDR commodities; each plot needs geolocation in the Due Diligence Statement, and plots over 4 ha must be sent as mapped boundaries.

My rubber suppliers only sent GPS points. Is that enough?

It depends on plot size. A single point is allowed only for plots of 4 hectares or under; anything larger must be a mapped boundary under Art. 2(28). Watch the missing-area case too: a point with no Area is silently given 4 hectares, so an unmeasured plot is declared at a size nobody chose.

Two dealers sent me the same tapping plot. Will TRACES catch the duplicate?

No. TRACES imports overlapping and identical production places with no message, and the declaration then covers the same land twice. DDSpass tests the plots in your file against each other and flags overlaps, duplicates and plots contained inside a neighbour. A connected group can be merged into one boundary, area recomputed.

Can I export one file per dealer instead of one large file?

Yes. Switch the output to Type I and DDSpass writes one file per producer, grouped on ProducerName and ProducerCountry. It is also the answer when a file nears the 25 MB per-DDS ceiling: DDSpass strips collinear vertices and simplifies within a 0.5% area guard, then shows the official split-DDS instructions if it still will not fit.