The changelog below will highlight what has changed between this new version and the previous version.
Table of Contents:
Release notes summary
This release contains a couple of new data quality tests, both for geospatial and attribute domains, and an increased country coverage for existing deforestation and legality tests. Additionally, we are updating deforestation maps (public) with an improved methodology for the first countries.
The new test for the geospatial domain identifies invalid polygons. Invalid polygons need to be fixed (made valid) before they can be accepted by other systems (such as ICE CoT, or TRACES). Additionally, many Verify tests require valid polygons. For these tests, Verify is always attempting to fix polygons (see also Preprocessing).
We are now supporting three additional countries with commercial deforestation maps (DEF04), added three more countries for our recently released test for indigenous people and local communities areas (LGL03), and are updating public deforestation maps (DEF01).
Changelog v1.04
Test | Test Version | Changes | Background |
GET09 | v1.00 | New test: Farm plot polygon is invalid. Invalid farm plot polygons receive a critical risk, while valid farm plot polygons receive a low risk score. | The most common cases for invalid polygons had already been detected by existing tests. This general test has been added to facilitate insights into all invalid polygons, and to catch additional rarer cases. This test uses the OGC standard v1.2.1 of valid polygons. |
ATC04 | v1.00 | New test: Farm plot ID is duplicated. Any farm plot with duplicated IDs receives a critical risk score. | Farm plot IDs should be unique for each farm plot. Duplications can lead to errors and misattributions in the dataset. This test identifies any duplications. |
ATT03 | v1.01 | This test is now skipped when the entire dataset does not contain farmer IDs. This results in all records receiving NA, instead of critical risk. | Previously, this test could pollute results if the farmer ID was not present in a dataset, assigning all records a critical risk. Now, only when individual farm records are missing they are assigned critical risk. |
LGL03 | v1.00 | Additional countries have been added. Supported countries now include (new countries in bold):
| This test checks for overlaps with indigenous people and local communities (IPLC) areas. |
DEF01 | v1.00 | For some countries, the reference data (deforestation map) is being updated. This includes the following countries:
Additionally, new countries are being supported with this new reference data approach:
| The reference data used by DEF01 is currently being updated, using a new improved methodology. The new methodology is configured per country to ensure the highest quality, and is a combination of multiple public forest maps (e.g., TMF & Global Forest Cover 2020 by the JRC, and World Cover 2020 by ESA), and public deforestation maps (e.g., Global Forest Change by GFW). The current version uses the latest published map to cover deforestation from 2021 to 2023, and global/regional datasets are now used to tailor forest/deforestation characteristics for each country. |
GEC09 | v1.01 | An exception for thresholds has been added to account for local differences in Nigeria, for the cocoa commodity. Thresholds have been increased (made more lenient). | In Nigeria, land fragmentation has led to farmers having plots further apart. Therefore, these exceptions have been introduced. |
GER03 | v1.01 | An exception for thresholds has been added to account for local differences in Nigeria, for the cocoa commodity. Only low and medium risk outcomes are available. | To enable users to use LBAs (licensed buying agents) as the aggregators, we have removed the critical and high risk outcomes. As LBAs are mobile, using their “location” is merely an approximation and will not lead to high or critical risk outcomes anymore. |
DEF04 | v1.00 | Reference data for additional countries have been added for the commercial deforestation maps. The following countries have been added for this release:
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