Executive Summary
How plot level satellite evidence supports due diligence under the European Union Deforestation Regulation: what a plot was at the 31 December 2020 cut-off, what has changed inside it since, and what replaced the canopy where it did. Written for compliance platforms, traders and processors filing due diligence statements, the producers asked to prove their plantations, and the auditors who read the evidence.
Key Methodological Findings
The Union’s own global forest baseline classifies 31% of rubber as forest, the highest overlap of any regulated commodity, and its peer review states that co-location with mapped forest does not by itself indicate non-compliance.
A mature plantation reads as tree cover in every global layer, and its normal life of rotational felling and dry season leaf-fall produces exactly the signals a tree-cover-loss alert exists to catch.
Spectral fractions separate what replaced a canopy, so harvest debris on a working estate is distinguishable from cleared ground rather than both arriving as one loss alert.
A plot the method cannot assess is returned as not evaluated with the reason, never as clear. In compliance a silent clear is the most expensive output there is.
Physics & Inversion Methodology
Archive reflectance is screened per pixel from each mission’s own quality layers, and a date on which too little of the plot is clear is reported as not evaluated rather than summarised from the part that was. Season matched dry window composites are resolved into green vegetation, non-photosynthetic vegetation, soil and shade by spectral mixture analysis against published generic endmembers. Change between two dates is thresholded from the pair’s own scatter rather than a fixed cut, and every change figure is quoted beside the area that noise alone would produce at that threshold.
Citation & Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
@techreport{axine_plantation_evidence_under_eudr_2026,
author = {Axine Labs},
title = {Plantation Evidence Under EUDR},
institution = {Axine Labs Technical Whitepaper Series},
number = {6},
year = {2026},
doi = {pending (Zenodo, 2026)},
url = {https://axinelabs.com/papers/plantation-evidence-under-eudr}
}