EUDR timber geolocation — TRACES-ready, without rejections

Shapefiles and local grids

Forestry plots often arrive as a zipped Shapefile in a projected national coordinate system. DDSpass reads the .prj, reprojects to WGS84 decimal degrees, and repairs the geometry issues (self-intersections, unclosed rings) that TRACES rejects.

Large files, under the limit

Detailed forest boundaries can push a file over the 25 MB TRACES limit. DDSpass simplifies boundaries within a 0.5% area guard to bring it under — or gives you the official split instructions if it still won’t fit.

Concession boundary or harvest compartment?

Settle first what counts as one plot: the whole concession, or the compartments that were felled. That is a scope question for your due diligence, but it decides how many features the file carries and how large it gets.

One thing is not a choice. A plot over 4 hectares must be a mapped boundary, not a point (EUDR Art. 2(28)), and forestry plots are almost always well over that. A point with no Area is silently defaulted by the system to 4 hectares, so compartment centroids land on the declaration as 4 ha felling sites.

DDSpass computes each polygon's area from the geometry and shows it beside the hectarage you declared, so a stated size that no longer matches the mapped boundary is caught on screen.

Inholdings, buffers and the interior-ring problem

Forest compartments are full of things that are not harvestable forest: a lake, a riparian buffer, a protected patch left standing. GIS teams encode those as interior rings, and that is one of only two things TRACES visibly refuses, with the warning Polygon with holes are not accepted by the system.

The quieter problem is a hole that gets through. The system ignores the interior ring and counts the whole outer boundary as production area: in testing, a donut plot reported 119.11 hectares against a true net area of roughly 100.4.

DDSpass finds interior rings, strips them with a warning, and maps the result so you see what is now declared.

From a forestry GIS export to the four fields TRACES reads

A forest attribute table carries compartment codes, species and felling year. TRACES reads none of it. It reads four keys, spelled exactly: ProducerName, ProducerCountry, ProductionPlace and Area. The whitelist is case-sensitive, so productionplace is ignored, not corrected.

• Outlines exported as lines — LineString is not accepted; a closed line becomes a polygon, an open one is flagged.
• Rings that never close, or hold fewer than four positions.
• "Area": "3" written as text, read as 0 hectares.
• A country name or non-ISO2 code (UK becomes GB, EL becomes GR).
• Coordinates finer than the six decimals TRACES keeps.

It runs in your browser: concession geometry is never uploaded, and the on-screen fix list is free.

Questions

Is timber in scope for the EUDR?

Yes. Wood is one of the seven EUDR commodities, alongside cattle, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber and soya. Harvest plots need geolocation in the Due Diligence Statement, and a plot over 4 hectares must be a mapped boundary. The regulation applies to medium and large operators from 30 December 2026.

Can I upload a Shapefile or KML straight into TRACES?

No. The file picker accepts only .geojson and .json; Shapefile, KML, KMZ, Excel, CSV, GPX and PDF cannot even be selected. Forestry data must be converted and reprojected to WGS84 first, which DDSpass does in the browser.

Do I declare the whole concession or each compartment?

That is a scope decision for your due diligence, and DDSpass does not make it for you. Either shape works technically. If the compartment version pushes the export over 25 MB, the tool strips redundant vertices and simplifies within a 0.5% area guard, then falls back to the official split route.

TRACES accepted my file — is the declaration correct?

Not necessarily. On the acceptance server the only visible rejections were invalid JSON syntax and a polygon with holes; everything else is swallowed silently. Coordinate order, area semantics, ring closure and country-code format are never checked, so a clean import can still declare the wrong hectarage.