Screen 5

Concordance Preview

A worked sample of the CITES ↔ HS mapping problem, shown to establish the method. This is not a finished concordance and is not presented as one.

Illustrative — eight taxa, hand-mapped
The full concordance is built during delivery, not before it. What this screen demonstrates is that the mapping is understood to be many-to-many, lossy and vintage-dependent — which is the part that determines whether a concordance is usable. Every row below is stored with an explicit confidence grade rather than presented as a settled equivalence.
Why this sits next to a charcoal pilot
HS 4402 has no direct CITES listing — charcoal is not species-scoped in the nomenclature at all. That is precisely the point. The reconciliation machinery on Screen 3 works on any HS line; the concordance layer is what lets a conservation question be asked of it. The two are separable, and the pilot deliberately proves the first before claiming the second.

Sample mappings

TaxonCommon nameCITESHSHS descriptionConfidence
Aquilaria malaccensisAgarwood / gaharuApp. II4403Wood in the roughambiguous
Gonystylus spp.RaminApp. II4407Wood sawn or chipped lengthwisepartial
Dalbergia latifoliaIndonesian rosewood / sonokelingApp. II4407Wood sawn or chipped lengthwisepartial
Pterocarpus indicusNarra / angsanaApp. II4403Wood in the roughpartial
Swietenia macrophyllaBigleaf mahoganyApp. II4407Wood sawn or chipped lengthwisepartial
Diospyros spp.Madagascar ebonyApp. II4403Wood in the roughambiguous
Cedrela spp.Spanish cedarApp. II4407Wood sawn or chipped lengthwisepartial
Pericopsis elataAfrormosiaApp. II4412Plywood, veneered panelspartial

Why each mapping is graded, not asserted

  • Aquilaria malaccensis ambiguous
    Agarwood moves as chips, powder, oil and rough wood. One taxon spans HS 4403, 1211.90 and 3301.29 — no single HS line captures the listing.
  • Gonystylus spp. partial
    Indonesian-origin listing. HS 4407 is not species-specific, so ramin is indistinguishable from other sawn tropical hardwood at the HS line alone.
  • Dalbergia latifolia partial
    Genus-wide Dalbergia listing since CoP17. Species identity is lost at HS level; national tariff lines are required to narrow it.
  • Pterocarpus indicus partial
    Listed at CoP19. Widely traded from Southeast Asia; HS 4403 covers all rough wood regardless of species.
  • Swietenia macrophylla partial
    Neotropical populations listed. Illustrates the reverse problem: the listing is population-scoped, the HS line is not scoped at all.
  • Diospyros spp. ambiguous
    Population-scoped to Madagascar. Origin, not species, is the discriminator — which is exactly what mirror reconciliation surfaces.
  • Cedrela spp. partial
    Listed CoP18, effective 2020. A concordance must be vintage-aware: the same HS line means different things before and after a listing takes effect.
  • Pericopsis elata partial
    Reaches trade as processed panels. Shows that the mapping has to follow the product further down the chain than the raw-wood lines.

Three structural problems recur: a listing may be genus-wide while the HS line is not species-scoped at all; a listing may be population-scoped, so origin rather than species is the discriminator; and listings take effect on dates, so the same HS line means different things across vintages. A concordance that ignores any of the three produces confident wrong answers.