Detailed Assessment of a Coffee Plantation to verify Compliance with the EUDR

The Detailed Assessment builds on the deforestation alerts generated by EUDRx, EUDR Coffee Check and EUDRx ISCC

GRAS conducts deforestation assessments for EUDR-relevant production areas using advanced remote sensing technologies, strictly adhering to the EUDR cut-off date of 31 December 2020. This guarantees that products entering the market are free from deforestation and strengthens the EU’s commitment to tackling global deforestation and forest degradation.

As a preliminary step of the Detailed Assessment, an efficient multi-step approach identifies plantation plots with high risk of deforestation by overlapping the farms’ outlines with GRAS’s in-house generated deforestation map.

Detailed Assessment of the conversion status

The Detailed Assessment includes the verification of the conversion status of these alerts. GRAS experts analyse high-resolution images. In this way, even the smallest changes in land cover can be recognised or, for example, coffee in agroforestry systems can be ruled out. In addition to singular satellite images, a time series analysis of the vegetation index NDVI (normalized difference vegetation index) is applied, to potentially identify the type and point in time of conversion. In this way, it can be determined whether deforestation took place before or after the cut-off date and, finally, provide evidence for the companies that they fulfil their due diligence obligations and can import into EU.

**Figure 1:** Analysing the times series of the NDVI to obtain precise information about the land cover and the specific time of deforestation. This exemplary time series shows changes after the cut-off date and reveals further changes in land cover thereafter.

Detailed analysis results can be used to prove due diligence to the EU

GRAS provides all analysis results in concise and comprehensive summary reports, which can then be made available to national authorities responsible for the checks on behalf of the EU.
Find out more about the EUDR here and our platform, EUDRx here.