Vidimus
Projects | | Links: Live at vidimusearth.com | Source (AGPL-3.0)
Vidimus reads public satellite archives over plots of land and produces a per-plot record of whether forest was cleared after the EU’s 31 December 2020 cut-off — the core question behind the EU Deforestation Regulation. Before/after imagery pinned to the cut-off, tree-cover loss counted per pixel against the EU’s own forest baseline, and an explicit record of every date nothing could be seen.
Vidimus is the clause a medieval scribe added to a copied document — we have seen — attesting the original was examined, at a stated place, on a stated day. It certifies the act of looking, not that the contents are true. That distinction is the whole tool.
From 30 December 2026, EU importers of cocoa, coffee, soy, palm oil, rubber, cattle and timber must hold the geolocation of every plot behind a shipment and be able to show the ground was not deforested after the cut-off. Vidimus turns that into a checkable record.
What makes it different from a red polygon on a map
- Per pixel, not per plot. Post-cut-off loss is intersected with the 2020 forest baseline pixel by pixel, so a clearing on ground that was already plantation in 2020 is not counted as deforestation.
- It records when it could not see. Cloud, no pre-cut-off imagery, a plot straddling two satellite tiles — each is a distinct state. We could not observe this never renders as we observed nothing.
- Nothing is repaired quietly. A self-intersecting boundary is refused with the coordinate where it crosses itself. Geometry is immutable once recorded; verdicts are versioned and append-only.
- Every figure is re-derivable. Layer, version, retrieval date and the commit that computed it travel with each number.
Over a thousand real plots across 26 countries and all seven regulated commodities, all carrying Sentinel-2 imagery. Reading the record needs no account.
Stack — Next.js · PostGIS · Copernicus Sentinel-1/2 · Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs · MapLibre GL · a forensics engine that runs adversarial fixtures against itself on every build.
