Services
We provide you with the data and science you need throughout the project cycle, from selecting your project areas and activities, creating your proposal or business case, designing Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV)/Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (MEAL) systems, and monitoring and reporting on your project’s carbon, ecosystem, and socio-economic impact.
Project design stage
The design stage encompasses three pivotal phases: Pre-Feasibility, Feasibility, and Project Design Document (PDD).
Pre-Feasibility
Relevance: If you’re asking yourself questions such as “What areas in a state or county would have the highest potential for nature-based solution projects? What types of activities might work best in the area where my organisation has a presence?”, etc. then this tool may provide value for you. If you know the answers to these questions, move ahead. We explore the wider landscape and help you find the optimal locations where environmental conditions, environmental trends, and operational access meet to ensure an optimised foundation for site selection
Applicability: Forest protection, reforestation, agroforestry, regenerative agriculture, rangelands, etc.
- Why We Do It: Investing in location selection allows increase the number of credits you can generate, avoiding areas that don’t meet basic criteria, as well as helping with funding and subsequent sales.
- How We Do It: We use a set of environmental and operational indicators, some developed by us and some public, to generate heatmaps of restoration potential. We already mask out locations that would be ineligible due to certification criteria. All data and indicators are supported by white paper methodologies with reference to peer-reviewed science.
- What You Get: Heatmaps of your planned project geographies showing the best potential locations, recommendations for next steps, and a methodological narrative.
- What We Need: We simply need your preferred state or region and an outline of your planned activity types (for instance agroforestry, agriculture, or pastoralism).
- Timeline: Typically, this phase is completed within 1 week, depending on the size and complexity of the region.
This tool can also be used by any project developer or marketplace to assess and quality-assure projects.
Feasibility
Relevance: If you’re asking yourself questions such as “How much carbon is my project likely to produce? Can environmental additionality be demonstrated for my areas? What methodology should I certify my project under?”, etc. then this tool may provide value for you. If you know the answers to these questions, move ahead. During this phase, we confirm the chosen area’s suitability, validate environmental additionality, and estimate carbon yields over a specific timeline. If we already did the pre-feasibility work for you, the chosen area’s suitability will already be established.
Applicability: Forest protection, reforestation, agroforestry, regenerative agriculture, rangelands, etc.
- Why We Do It: Support raising ex-ante finance, optimising activities and sites, as well as manage risks by ensuring alignment of the project to the chosen methodologies.
- How We Do It: We use a combination of remote sensing methodologies, along with reviewing peer reviewed research regarding the activities and contexts, as well as any documentation you can provide on the socio-economic, policy, and environmental context. We provide you with simple ground-truthing methods that allow validating and further interpreting remote analysis.
- What You Get: A comprehensive feasibility report, including projected carbon yields, financial projections, and additionality evidence. This will allow your organisation to approach potential buyers and investors to seek ex-ante financing to support your project’s startup phase.
- What We Need: The exact locations and activities planned for your project, any relevant contextual information, and the certification you seek. Soil carbon (regen ag and pastoralist) projects require further information on management practices.
Timeline: Typically, this phase ranges from 2-3 weeks, with variation based on the complexity of the project. If pre-feasibility was done by us, one week can be removed from this timeline.
Project Design Document (PDD)
Relevance: If you already have your locations and activities set, methodology chosen, and funding secured, you’re probably in the process of creating your PDDs. In the PDD phase, our focus shifts to drafting the Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) related portions of the documents. We craft the MRV system and draft the corresponding sections for your PDD.
Applicability: Forest protection, reforestation, agroforestry, regenerative agriculture, rangelands, etc.
- Why We Do It: A well-structured MRV system, clearly articulated in the PDD, creates a solid foundation for the ultimate success of your projects, helps maintain price, and ensures the biggest threats to success are accounted for in the design.
- How We Do It: Using insights from the feasibility phase and additional ground truthing, we validate findings from the previous phases, and develop an MRV system tailored to your project, complying with the chosen carbon credit methodologies.
- What You Get: Detailed MRV sections ready to be incorporated into your PDD, according to the requirements of the chosen certification methodology.
- What We Need: Information from the feasibility phase and any other project-specific data that can enhance the MRV system design. Ground-validation of certain environmental indicators will be highly useful.
Timeline: This phase is usually fitted to your drafting process to ensure that your projects MRV system benefits the overall planning of your project, and will be finalised along with the overall PDDs.
Implementation Stage
Ongoing Monitoring
Relevance: If you have an active project but lack a good overview of how it is progressing, this service can add value to you. We can provide ongoing monitoring throughout the implementation period of your project to ensure that you know where you’re having successes and issues, and can learn from successes and mitigate risks.
Applicability: Forest protection, reforestation, agroforestry, regenerative agriculture, rangelands, etc. Derisking is particularly useful for forest-related projects where sudden events such as fires or logging can destroy the project’s work in very brief time periods.
- Why We Do It: To help you learn from your successes and mitigate your failures, supporting continuous improvements in project quality, as well as to allow you to demonstrate to any buyers that you have a credible monitoring system in place.
- How We Do It: We use our analytical platform to provide the indicators that are most relevant to you (whether activities such as tilling/no-tilling occurrence, cover crop presence, or outcomes such as biomass change, etc), with engaging map and dashboard visualisations.
- What You Get: Depending on your capacity and preference, you will receive either access to a platform with all the relevant data and the ability to explore your project, automated reports featuring key indicators, or full monitoring and analysis by our team. Regardless, data will be visualised both in geographic maps with clear colour-coding and in graphs that can be pasted to your reporting.
- What We Need: Your project boundaries and activities conducted per area. Any further contextual information you have will be useful.
Timeline & Level of Effort: This is an ongoing process that lasts for the duration of your project. Our level of effort is largely defined by the degree of analytical services you require from us on top of our standard indicator offering, and on the type of landscape intervention
Verification/Compliance Stage
In the verification stage, we ensure your project’s carbon sequestration – either or both Above Ground Biomass (AGB) and Soil Organic Carbon – complies with the relevant standards.
Above Ground Biomass Verification / Compliance
- How We Do It: We assess the AGB carbon sequestration using remote sensing, allometric equations, and AI technology.
- Why We Do It: To verify the actual carbon sequestration and thus allowing the carbon credits to be issued.
- What You Get: Verification report detailing the carbon sequestration in AGB and any potential deviations from the initial estimates. Also, the baseline will be revalidated every year to ensure that issues with regional changes do not lead to accumulating over- or under-issuance of carbon credits.
- What We Need: Up-to-date geographic boundaries of the project and timelines of interventions done at each plot. We built strong confidence in our AGB mapping approach, but field-collected Diameter-at-Breast Height (DBH) and Canopy Height (CH) can ensure independent validation of AGB model results.
Timeline & Level of Effort: Depending on project size, complexity and whether additional information is provided by the developer.
Soil Carbon Verification / Compliance
- How We Do It: We employ the current state of the art of scientific understanding of soil for a scientifically robust approach combining the RothC biogeochemical process-based model, remote sensing, AI and soil sampling. This is the most scientifically validated and transparent approach to measuring the hugely complex challenge of soil carbon. We use satellite imagery to drastically reduce the cost of this process by stratifying the project area and optimising the soil sampling plan (fewer samples collected), as well as deriving required model inputs (net primary productivity, bare soil occurrence, temperature, precipitation).
- Why We Do It: To quantify the effect of the improved land-use practice into SOC stocks and to allow you to issue carbon credits based on the verified soil organic carbon pool changes.
- What You Get: You receive the reports and the documentation that are required by reputed methodologies such as VM0042 ( and VM0053 for model validation) and include an assessment of soil organic carbon pool changes against the baseline scenario.
- What We Need: Up-to-date geographic project boundaries, management data and in-situ samples
Timeline & Level of Effort: Depending on project size, complexity, and delivery of inputs
Partners and Clients
Start Your Ecosystem Restoration Journey with SoilWatch Today!
The world needs more innovators and leaders like you, committed to harnessing the power of nature in the fight against climate change. With SoilWatch, you won’t navigate this journey alone.
We invite you to take the next step with us. Let’s delve deeper into how our services can be tailored to your specific project, discuss any queries you might have, and explore the potential for creating impactful, long-lasting, and verified restoration and carbon removal solutions together.
Get excited! You’re about to take a monumental stride with robust scientific rigour and truly make a difference where it is needed most
