EUDR screening for timber and wood importers.
Wood is the one Annex I commodity with its own separate legal test, forest degradation, not just deforestation, and it's the only one where sourcing entirely inside the EU still puts you in scope. Here's how EUDR applies to a wood importer specifically.
What counts as wood under EUDR, and who counts as the operator
Annex I's wood entry is the broadest of the seven: logs, sawn wood, veneer, panels, wood charcoal, coopers' products like barrels and casks, wooden frames and tableware, furniture, pulp, paper, and printed matter are all in scope. If you import any of these from outside the EU, you may be an operator even if "timber importer" isn't how you'd describe your business.
Domestic EU wood counts too. EUDR applies to wood grown and harvested inside the EU, not only imports. A Nordic sawmill selling only domestic Swedish or Finnish timber is still the legal operator who must file geolocation and due-diligence data on its own harvest sites, even though the actual deforestation risk on that wood is negligible. Being low-risk changes your due-diligence tier; it doesn't remove the filing obligation.
Certification is common in timber. Plot-level geolocation is still new
Timber has a mature certification ecosystem that coffee, rubber, and palm oil don't: FSC and PEFC chain-of-custody certificates are widely held, and a certificate-holder search is often the closest thing to a directory this sector has. That's genuinely useful evidence for legality, but it isn't the same thing EUDR asks for. A chain-of-custody certificate documents where wood entered a processing chain; it doesn't by itself give you the specific plot-level geolocation Article 9 requires for every shipment.
Large, low-risk timber operations often lean on exactly this: certification plus a TRACES NT reference number, because their wood is domestic or already well-documented. That's a reasonable approach for that kind of company; it isn't a substitute for a genuinely high-risk tropical-hardwood shipment, where a certificate alone won't tell you whether the specific plot behind it was cleared after 2020.
What a wood screening actually shows, and why it's different for wood
Upload your harvest-site, sawmill, or supplier list with coordinates (or names and addresses if that's what you have) and every location is checked for forest-cover change signals since 31 December 2020.
Wood gets a check no other commodity gets. EUDR's own definitions treat forest degradation (structural change from primary forest to plantation or other wooded land) as a separate legal concept from deforestation, and apply it specifically to wood products. When your upload's commodity field is set to wood or timber, a degradation-only signal, with no full clear-cut loss, is surfaced as an AMBER flag. For every other commodity that exact same underlying signal is shown for context only and does not affect the flag, because the degradation criterion legally doesn't apply to it. Label your rows correctly so you get the check the regulation actually requires for wood.
The Forest Type (2020) field adds JRC's baseline mix of primary, naturally regenerating, and planted/plantation forest. It is useful context for timber review, but it is not a before-and-after test and cannot prove that one type converted into another.
No dedicated ground-truth sites for wood yet
Our hand-verified answer-key sites so far are concentrated in coffee and cocoa, the two commodities where this project has run the deepest validation work. We don't yet have a dedicated set of independently confirmed wood examples in that same suite. The underlying satellite pipeline, and the wood-specific degradation check described above, apply identically to every wood plot you submit; we're simply flagging that the extra layer of hand-verification other commodities have isn't built out for wood yet.
If your timber sourcing includes charcoal, cooperage wood, or paper pulp rather than raw logs, the same satellite check applies. These sub-products are explicitly listed in Annex I and are easy to overlook if you're searching for "timber importer" obligations specifically.
Screen your wood suppliers
Send us your harvest-site or supplier list and get a RED/AMBER/GREEN read back the same day, with before/after imagery for every screenable location. It supports your own Article 10/11 due diligence; it isn't a substitute for it and isn't a Due Diligence Statement.