How to Monitor, Report on and Verify a Land Restoration Project
Measuring the impact of restoration projects can be overwhelming. For the world’s restoration champions — locally led organizations that restore degraded land through growing trees — the challenge starts with choosing the right indicators, data sources, apps and platforms to use. It only grows more complex when collecting, analyzing and sharing data.
Then come the trade-offs. Different stakeholders, like funders and government agencies, want different information. Donors and private investors are clamoring for more transparency and want better, verified data to elevate the most successful projects, but budgets for monitoring and evaluation are tight. Slight discrepancies in the definitions of common terms like “hectare restored” or “tree” can radically change the data and methods used to measure progress. Collecting accurate location data that covers every planted tree can be costly and burdensome. And time is limited.
Ultimately, these challenges make it hard to understand why certain projects succeed while others struggle.
A Single Recipe for Monitoring Restoration Progress
In Africa, where the need for finance is greatest, Restore Local is tackling this problem head-on. Since 2022, its TerraFund partnership has channeled $32 million to nearly 200 restoration champions. By funding projects that meet the needs of local communities and embrace dozens of proven restoration techniques — such as growing millions of trees on farms in agroforestry systems or planting native species within degraded community forests — it is building a solution from the ground up.
Since the first projects received funding in 2022, our team has been developing a robust and comprehensive monitoring, reporting and verification system to measure their impact. Our guide, How We Monitor, Report and Verify (MRV), summarizes this practical, cost-effective approach. It is a living document, shaped by technical experts and on-the-ground practitioners, that we improve as we develop new techniques and bring in new partners.
This guide comes to life through TerraMatch, an end-to-end platform that matches restoration champions with funding and then helps them submit high-quality data to track progress for six years. That data is then analyzed and published to bring new transparency to the restoration sector.
After testing on more than 240 projects and consulting with leading financial partners and dozens of technical experts, we found that this approach is shifting the sector’s mindset toward a focus on scalability and consistency.
The Ingredients for Restoration Monitoring, Reporting and Verification
Developing a new MRV process is like creating a new dish, drawing from classic recipes but adding a fresh twist. It’s a blend of creativity, scientific know-how and real-world experience.
Like any new dish, you need to impress your critics and be prepared for feedback. Our MRV process is that recipe. We define what our indicators mean and why they matter, and how to collect and measure the data. We also outline how often to assess, manage and verify the information, and how to share the results with restoration champions and funders. Documenting the process helps TerraFund see the big picture and how all the pieces fit together. Mapping the workflow shows where restoration champions or analysts can save time without sacrificing quality.
Let’s walk through an example of how each ingredient is combined on an actual land-restoration site in Rwanda, managed by one of our restoration champions, Nature Rwanda, and its implementing partner, BirdLife International.
Ingredient #1: Geospatial Polygons
We can’t monitor progress if we don’t know where restoration is happening. Enter polygons: location data showing the boundaries of a project. Creating accurate polygons is no easy feat. Restoring land is complex, time-sensitive, and dependent on shifting weather patterns and community needs. Polygons are best collected after planting is complete and directly from the field, an especially challenging task when project sites are remote or spread across the plots of hundreds of individual landholders.
To make this task easier, we have partnered with Wells for Zoë, a champion from TerraFund’s first cohort of investments and a partner of Mastercard’s Priceless Planet Coalition, to develop a field data collection app. Flority enables champions to easily create polygons in the field, even in areas without reliable internet connection.
TerraFund’s data quality analysts train champions on how to collect the data, correct errors and add contextual information to each polygon file, including the target land use of the area they are restoring, their restoration strategies and the number of trees they have planted in each area.
This information provides a broad understanding of how champions are restoring each landscape — and which restoration strategies are most successful in certain areas. By summing up the total area of all polygons collected from a champion, we can determine the total hectares under restoration and compare that against the project’s goals.
Ingredient #2: Progress Reports from the Field
Location is an important data source and the staple ingredient of independent verification. But it can’t tell us everything. To get the fullest flavor of our projects, we need to add progress reports from the field into the mix.
Champions report every six months through the TerraMatch platform, submitting information about key indicators that satellites can’t capture, but which create a powerful picture of restoration’s impact on a community. These reports include quantitative data on the number of jobs created and species of trees planted, as well as narrative information that illuminates each project’s challenges and successes.
For example, BirdLife International and Nature Rwanda reported in 2024 that they have planted over 300,000 trees across 500 hectares in Rwanda's Rusizi District. They have also trained more than 3,400 households with skills in climate resilience and sustainable land management.
Beyond restoration, these organizations are also empowering local communities. Nature Rwanda supported the formation of two community groups, Rasano and Nyamihanda, each starting with 30 members. The former pooled their savings to launch a small pig farm, while the latter is starting a poultry project. To ensure long-term success, Nature Rwanda recruited 25 “community tree stewards” who volunteer weekly to monitor tree health. This has led to an 85% tree survival rate.
We tell the stories of these champions to highlight how robust data can enhance the investment case for restoration –– and catalyze additional financing.
Ingredient #3: Satellite and Field Data for Verification
It’s important for us to verify key indicators, such as the number of trees planted, jobs created and trees restored, at the end of the project. We do this by cross-referencing reported information with independent sources like remote sensing data or employment records.
If the numbers differ significantly, we follow up with project leads to understand the reason for the discrepancy and correct the figures or create an updated work plan. Champions that continue to show discrepancies undergo additional verification through site visits to strengthen record-keeping and reporting. Identifying these challenges as early as possible in a project’s lifetime helps us offer support when projects need it and keep the work on track.
We also use remote sensing data from Land & Carbon Lab, Michigan State University (MSU) and Maxar to analyze additional biophysical indicators and assess restoration progress over the life of the project.
Let’s start by looking at how we verify tree count and jobs created. Then, we’ll follow with a look at other biophysical progress indicators.
Tree count
To verify the number of trees planted and restored at the end of a project, our team counts trees within each polygon using an AI object-detection model that analyzes high-resolution satellite images. The model is trained to spot and count trees by identifying tree crowns, and early results show that the AI count closely matches data collected from the field. With this approach, we count trees at baseline (before the project starts), partway through the project to verify that planting happened, and again at the end of five years to assess the survival rate.
For projects where satellite imagery is not available or baseline conditions make this remote-sensing approach inaccurate, we send staff to count the number of trees in a sample plot and extrapolate the total from there.
Tree cover
Using WRI’s Tropical Tree Cover dataset, our team calculates the tree cover percentage across each project site throughout its lifecycle. Comparing the tree cover at the start of the project to the total five years later, we can confirm that planted trees are growing and assess how they are changing overall tree cover within and around the site.
Carbon stocks
All trees store planet-warming carbon; we want to know how much. In partnership with researchers at MSU’s Global Observatory for Ecosystem Services, we measured trees on pilot TerraFund projects at baseline to quantify existing carbon stocks. Then we combined those measurements with high-resolution satellite imagery to map the amount of carbon each tree sequesters across the wider landscape. We will collect data again after five years to assess how much carbon the newly grown trees have sequestered.
WRI and MSU are also using baseline carbon stocks and standard growth metrics to predict estimated carbon stocks 30 years into the future. These results can help identify which restoration techniques sequester the most carbon — and could strategically pursue carbon credits to finance their work.
Jobs created
Restoration projects are just as important for people as they are for nature and the climate. We verify the number of people each project employs by comparing reported job numbers with submitted employment records. And we keep an eye out for red flags, such as sudden increases in the number of employees outside the planting season or repeated figures in reports.
We cross-check the gender and age of employees, too, to gauge whether projects are achieving their social equity goals. And we look at the number of part-time and full-time workers to understand which project designs lead to more permanent economic opportunities for local communities.
Serving Up the Meal: Displaying Progress Through TerraMatch’s Data Dashboard
The comprehensive process gives us vital insights, but the results aren’t worth much if they aren’t communicated. Just like serving a meal, presenting restoration data must cater to unique tastes. Different audiences want to know different details about the projects and their progress.
- Restoration champions can use data and remote sensing results to showcase their progress and impact.
- Donors and investors can see the impact of their investments across projects.
- Government partners can gain insights to shape policies supporting restoration.
- WRI teams and partners, like Realize Impact and Barka Fund, can use the data to manage risks and strengthen the capacity of restoration champions.
We have spent the past three years building the TerraMatch system to systematically collect and quality assure data. Over 240 nonprofit organizations and enterprises are already tracking their impacts there.
The TerraMatch dashboard displays this wealth of progress data for each project, across entire countries, and within investment portfolios. By clearly packaging the data collected through the MRV framework, we can now tell a more complete story of restoration progress.
And there is progress. TerraFund has made significant strides since its beginning in 2022.
Improving the Recipe for Restoration Monitoring
Our team is working to combine field-collected data with AI-backed satellite data insights to help TerraFund champions tell their full stories of impact. As we concentrate our work on priority landscapes, we are exploring low-cost techniques to measure even more complicated ecosystem services, such as water quality and biodiversity.
Together with the world’s restoration champions and technical experts, we will demonstrate how robust and digestible progress data can unlock further investment to transform the planet’s vital landscapes, tree by tree.
Hundreds of organizations are embracing this vision of a practical, cost-effective and scalable recipe for monitoring, reporting on and verifying the impact of restoration projects. Will you join us?