The European Commission has recently published the interface details for the Information System TRACES. The published details include further information on the format in which the due diligence statements for the EU Deforestation Regulation shall be submitted.
Geolocation data of farm plots needs to be stored in a specific format to be stored in the TRACES system.
Required Geodata Format: GeoJSON
GeoJSON is a format for encoding a variety of geographic data structures, based on JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)
Each GeoJSON has a "geometry" that describes the shape of the feature (point, polygon) and "properties" that contain the nonspatial attributes
WGS 84 is the standard global reference coordinate system used by the Global Positioning System (GPS)
It is commonly used to provide an accurate representation of the Earth's surface at a large scale
Different map projections may lead to distortions in distance, direction, scale, and area
Longitude and Latitude Coordinates
Latitude coordinates between -90 and +90
Longitude coordinates between -180 and +180
The order of coordinates must follow longitude, latitude
Stored in Decimal Degrees (DD) format
The EU TRACES system requires geographical coordinates to be stored in Decimal Degrees (DD) format
Caution:
Be aware that different systems use different coordinates orders. The GeoJSON format uses longitude-latitude notation, while Google Maps for example uses latitude-longitude. The same coordinates in GeoJSON file format will show the Kilimanjaro National Park (Tanzania) whilst when entering the same coordinates in Google Maps, you will find yourself in Southern Spain.
Different orders of latitude and longitude coordinates lead to different places on the map.
Geodata Type: Points
Geographical point coordinates must be depicted with at least six decimal places after the decimal separator
Point coordinates must have at least 6 digits after the decimal separator
Geodata Type: Polygons
Polygons must consist of at least 4 non-aligned points
Polygons shall not have intersections between their sides
The image on the left shows a correctly mapped polygon, the image on the left shows an incorrect polygon with intersections.
25 MB Limit per Due Diligence Statement
Each DDS is limited to 25 MB, which amounts to around 30-40.000 points or polygons per file
Unfortunately, GeoJSON isn't a memory-saving format as it has double the file size compared to other geospatial data formats such as Shapefile or Geopackage
Preparing and cleaning thousands to millions of farm geodata coordinates is a manual and time-consuming task that requires experience in GIS and handling geospatial data.
Nadar's EUDR software offers a digital solution that automates this pesky work and enables geodata processing from different file types and formats. In addition, our software offers geodata verification for the EUDR in real-time.
Caroline is an experienced data scientist with a management degree from TU Munich and a degree in earth observation from the University of Würzburg, which is co-chaired by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). She has worked as a data scientist in the areas of nature conservation and land use change monitoring at WWF, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), and at tech companies such as Celonis and Deloitte.
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