The EU Deforestation Regulation turns on a single question about the plots your timber came from: was any forest cleared there after 31 December 2020? A satellite archive can answer it — but only if you can tell a routine harvest from a genuine land-use conversion. Confuse the two and you either flag compliant timber as non-compliant, or certify a breach. Both are expensive mistakes, and both are avoidable.
Why this is the whole game
As of September 2026, EUDR due-diligence obligations apply from 30 December 2026 for large and medium operators and 30 June 2027 for micro and small enterprises, with the deforestation cut-off fixed at 31 December 2020. (The timeline has been amended before — confirm against the current EU text, Regulation (EU) 2023/1115, before you rely on it.) For most growers, the only record that reaches back to 2020 is the open satellite archive. So the compliance question becomes a remote-sensing question — and the remote-sensing question is one of interpretation, not download.
The trap: a harvest looks like deforestation from orbit
A commercial plantation on a normal rotation shows up in a time series as dramatic, repeated loss of canopy. To a naive change-detection algorithm — or an inexperienced analyst — that reads as forest loss. It isn't. Under the regulation, deforestation is a change of land use: forest or plantation becoming something that is no longer forest and is not replanted. A clear-fell that is replanted and grows back is a harvest cycle, and the land use never changed.
How you actually tell them apart
The distinction lives in the temporal signature, which is why a single image can never settle it:
- A harvest cycle produces a sawtooth NDVI trajectory — a sharp drop at felling, then a steady recovery over the rotation as the next crop establishes. Land use before and after is the same.
- A conversion produces a step change with no forest recovery, usually followed by a spectrally different land cover — cropland with its own seasonal cycle, bare ground, or built-up surface — that a classifier can identify.
Reading this correctly means building a pre-2021 baseline from imagery captured before the cut-off, then following each plot's land-cover trajectory forward — not eyeballing two dates, but characterising the whole curve, its recovery (or absence), and the cover that replaces it. It also means being honest about the plots where cloud, small size or edge effects leave the answer genuinely uncertain, and saying so rather than guessing.
What it's worth to you
Get it wrong in one direction and you exclude compliant timber from the EU market — a commercial loss on wood that was always legal. Get it wrong in the other and you sign off a consignment that breaches the regulation, with the legal and reputational exposure that carries. The interpretation is not a formality bolted onto a data download; it is the deliverable, and it is exactly where an experienced remote-sensing scientist earns their fee.
Where the line sits
TerraX produces and signs the spatial evidence — plot geometry, the pre-2021 baseline, and the land-cover history that distinguishes harvest from conversion, with its uncertainty stated. It does not issue an EUDR determination or guarantee acceptance by a competent authority; that decision, and its consequences, remain yours. What we give you is evidence a due-diligence file can stand on.
This is the core of our EUDR forestry compliance service. If you're preparing for the deadline, tell us roughly how many plots and where, and we'll take it from there.