How Laterite uses SurveyCTO to collect geospatial data offline to meet EUDR requirements for the Rainforest Alliance
Meet Laterite
Laterite is a leading data, research, and analytics firm. They specialize in data collection and development research projects in Africa and Latin America. Through their experienced field teams, they provide full-cycle evaluation projects and partner with organizations to bring evidence and learning to the center of decision making.
Offices: East Africa, West Africa, Latin America
Sector: Research, supply chain, agriculture
Use case: Field and offline data collection, GPS data collection
Features used: GPS features, offline data collection
The Challenge: Collecting accurate geolocation data in the Peruvian Amazon to meet strict EUDR requirements
The Rainforest Alliance is an international NGO that promotes environmentally and socially responsible practices in agriculture and forestry through its well-known certification program (you might recognize their little green frog!). Part of how they advance these responsible practices involves partnering directly with more than four million farmers and farmworkers, local communities, companies, and governments. Their “Thriving Landscapes” initiative is one such intervention designed to be a collaborative approach across these groups to sustain and regenerate these communities.
One critical landscape in the Thriving Landscapes initiative is in the remote Peruvian Amazon rainforest of San Martín, Peru. Here, two of the world’s most sought-after products, coffee and chocolate, are mainstay crops that provide for the livelihoods of many indigenous peoples. While Peru is the number one exporter of both crops and there has been economic benefit from this for its people, the result of growing so much coffee and cocoa has been widespread deforestation.
To address the deforestation problem while maintaining the livelihoods of coffee and cocoa farmers, the Rainforest Alliance has been working with 7,000+ coffee and cocoa farmers in San Martín to advance more sustainable growing methods that boost yields while improving land health.
Another focus area for the Rainforest Alliance is to ensure that the farmers and companies they work with are in compliance with the growing number of government and regulatory regulations, specifically the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR).
The EUDR requires companies importing and exporting specific commodities into the European Union to prove that those commodities and their derivatives did not come from deforested land or are contributing to forest degradation. Among those specific commodities? Coffee and cocoa.
To help farmers meet Rainforest Alliance certification as well as EUDR compliance requirements in San Martín, they needed to reliably gather geolocation data (specifically, recording farmland boundaries via polygons) and other farm-level data (like social demographic data of the farmers and land cover classification).
In previous years, the Rainforest Alliance collected data using GPS points that showed approximately where farms were, which allowed them to estimate a farm’s size and boundaries. However, this level of accuracy was not enough to meet impending EUDR requirements.
To truly get the level of granularity they wanted in their data, the Rainforest Alliance needed to use GPS points to create polygons around farm plots.
The problem?
The San Martín region is remote, difficult to navigate, and does not offer reliable internet connectivity—and geospatial data collection is complex and best left to experienced experts.
Enter Laterite.
The Solution: SurveyCTO’s features for offline geospatial data collection and integrating with Google Sheets
When the Rainforest Alliance brought Laterite into the Thriving Landscapes project in Peru, Laterite knew they would need reliable data on:
- Socioeconomic data about farmers
- Farm boundaries
- Land cover classification
The first objective could be achieved through offline surveys using SurveyCTO. Meeting the farm boundary and land cover data collection goals, however, would require the right technical tools in order to map out land plots offline using GPS polygons.
In SurveyCTO’s mobile data collection application SurveyCTO Collect, land polygons can be mapped out in the field using functionality that captures GPS coordinates within forms. These coordinates can be used to map out the boundaries of agricultural plots (or anything else) using our geoshape or geotrace field types, which enable data collectors to walk around the perimeters of set land masses while their SurveyCTO forms record their longitude, latitude, altitude, and the accuracy of those coordinates.
This type of in-depth, precise data collection was possible offline in remote San Martín through use of MBTiles and QGIS.
MBTiles are a specific file format that allows you to look at compilations of spatial data, called tilesets, like a map. MBTiles files can be downloaded for use in offline settings, and in combination with SurveyCTO’s functionality for capturing GPS coordinates means that mapping farmland boundaries could take place entirely offline.
To generate MBTiles and upload them to a tablet for data collection, Laterite relied on QGIS, a spatial visualization and decision-making tool, to load an initial satellite map layer. Then, they were able to define the MBTiles area to extract and set up a configuration to extract the MBTiles efficiently. Once an MBTiles file was exported, Laterite uploaded the file to SurveyCTO Collect as the base layer of an offline map, on which data collectors in the field could “draw” polygons on as they traced farm boundaries and automatically calculated their areas.
Besides offline farm mapping, there were also other actions for even better data quality that SurveyCTO enabled. The Laterite team inserted calculations into SurveyCTO forms to automatically determine the polygonal areas of the farms while carrying out the socioeconomic surveys. This allowed them to verify the land boundaries with farmers in real time to proactively resolve discrepancies that might have otherwise been introduced into the final data.
SurveyCTO’s integration with Google Sheets also powered a sophisticated monitoring system for Laterite. Data was initially streamed into Google Sheets and then pulled into Python for real-time complex data cleaning, processing, and analysis. Combining the socioeconomic, farm, and land cover data, this dashboard supported long-term impact monitoring for the project in Peru. It also let Laterite move beyond static spreadsheets to a data monitoring tool that was both more efficient for them as a team, and better at keeping their partners at the Rainforest Alliance informed of project progress.
To learn more about Laterite’s Python-based dashboard, read their blog.
The Results
The Rainforest Alliance has been operating the thriving landscapes project since 2012. In Peru, the Rainforest Alliance is impacting the livelihoods of more than 7,000 farmers and Indigenous communities while boosting the health of their lands. With the accurate geolocation data supplied by SurveyCTO’s GPS features, the Rainforest Alliance is not only advancing sustainability while diversifying local economies, but helping companies adhere to new governmental regulations designed to reduce practices that contribute to deforestation.
They are also scaling the project! Alongside community partners, the Rainforest Alliance is bringing together local leaders, companies, and the Peruvian forest and wildlife authority (SERFOR) to tackle deforestation and attract investment in healthy forests.
