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Radical Restoration: Democratizing Climate Tech for Ecosystem Recovery
In 2024, Distant Imagery Solutions planted 5.5 million mangroves in the UAE using self-engineered wooden drones designed for simplicity, adaptability, and cost-effectiveness. This milestone redefines the potential of community-driven, ecosystem-based restoration.
With projects ready in Brazil, Tonga, Kenya, and Indonesia, Distant Imagery empowers communities to lead. Our licensing and training platform equips locals to build and operate drones, fostering global knowledge exchange.
More than a technological solution, this is a movement of shared empowerment and stewardship. By connecting communities, Distant Imagery creates a global network innovating together to restore ecosystems and build climate resilience.
Also, our AI-powered Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) system tracks restoration progress and combats illegal activities, ensuring ecological recovery and long-term protection.
Using drones for non-invasive monitoring and assessment of crocodilian populations – a generalizable and accessible tool for stakeholders in conservation
This standartised solution combines drone technology and an innovative allometric approach to monitor and assess crocodilian populations who face significant threats, leading to population declines with 50% the 27 crocodilian species are threatened, with 25% critically endangered. Drones equipped with high-resolution cameras capture images of even partially submerged crocodiles, allowing precise, non-invasive length estimates based on head-to-body allometric ratios. This method overcomes challenges like logistical constraints, cost, need for highly trained personnel, observer bias, detectability, wildlife disturbance, and safety risks of traditional surveys. By covering remote areas efficiently, the solution enhances biodiversity mo,nitoring, informs conservation strategies, and enables a wide range of additional information to be collected. This solution is very cheap, requiring minimal training, and accessible to a wide range of users, including indigenous peoples and local communities and conservation practitioners.
Forest Cloud: A Digital Hub for Global Restoration and Conservation
The Restoration Platform, the core of Forest Cloud, transforms global restoration by simplifying fundraising and ensuring transparency for forest conservation. Since 2018, it has evolved to bring back a trillion trees and conserve 3 trillion existing trees. The open-source, open access, digital solution currently supports scientific restoration initiatives as well as managing and coordinating conservation and restoration efforts globally. It benefits from robust Restoration Standards, proprietary restoration monitoring applications, a robust peer-review system and an ecosystem of ancillary digital solutions – the ‘Forest Cloud’. Proven across 300 restoration initiatives and growing, the Platform unifies restoration organizations (ROs), donors, and scientists. Having demonstrated its success by restoring over 94M trees in 6 years, we now seek to improve its scale and geographic reach and solve the logistical challenges to contribute to a sustainable, thriving future.
Ribbit – a web app for automated identification and classification of anuran species
Ribbit is a citizen science web app that uses few-shot transfer machine learning to record, identify, and classify frog and toad calls, contributing crowdsourced data to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) to address data gaps, especially in the Global South. Identification apps offer significant potential for automatic in situ biodiversity monitoring (Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, 2022; Tuia et al., 2022; Nieto-Mora et al., 2023). Our app focuses on anurans, as they are crucial ecosystem indicators (Estes-Zumpf et al., 2022), with over 40% of the species at risk of extinction, and their unique vocalizations are ideal for acoustic identification. Beta testers revealed the app’s potential to contribute data to GBIF while empowering citizen scientists to engage in ecological monitoring. By creating an open-access platform for labeling biodiversity data, Ribbit enables conservation organizations to develop strategies for protecting vulnerable populations and preserving critical ecosystems.
Women's leadership in jaguar conservation
Since 2023, the Pró-Onça Institute has led a community-driven initiative in Brazil’s southern Cerrado to mitigate human-jaguar conflict and enhance climate resilience. We empower rural women as leaders in habitat restoration and wildlife monitoring, using drones, satellite data, camera traps, and geospatial tools to track jaguar movements across 70,000 hectares. Real-time data informs coexistence strategies between jaguars and ranchers. The solution supports the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework: Target 3 (conservation), Target 4 (restoration), and Target 21 (participation). It combines technological innovation with community leadership, yielding measurable outcomes: increased female participation, reduced conflict, and improved ecosystem resilience. Local conservation committees and ecotourism initiatives promote long-term sustainability, while responsible e-waste management ensures environmental integrity.
A Suitable Home for Antonio: A Community-Based Biocultural Corridor for Wild Felid Conservation in Private Reserves within the Serranía de los Paraguas KBA, Colombia
This project is developed on rural farms and Civil Society Natural Reserves within the KBA Serranía de los Paraguas, part of the Tropical Andes and Biogeographic Chocó biodiversity hotspots and the DRMI Serranía de los Paraguas protected area. Unsustainable livestock near forests safeguarding water sources has triggered human-wildlife conflicts (HWCs), tied to land-use change, biodiversity and ecosystem service loss, livestock predation, and retaliatory poaching. To address this, we propose a bottom-up approach involving landscape planning, adaptive livestock practices, sustainable energy for rural homes, behavior change toward wildlife, and community-based jaguar monitoring. This promotes long-term coexistence and improves life quality for people and jaguars, contributing to the Global Biodiversity Framework targets and Sustainable Development Goals, aligned with coexistence principles: do no harm, collaborate, understand context, integrate science and policy, and ensure sustainable pathways.
NFTrees for conservation
NFTrees is an innovative conservation financing model by Fundación Futuro that leverages blockchain, AI, and community governance to conserve and restore 195,000 hectares in the Andean Chocó. By tokenizing 10×10 meter plots using high-resolution carbon stock and biodiversity maps, NFTrees connects private-sector funds with local land stewards. This scalable, transparent solution addresses global challenges like deforestation, biodiversity loss, and climate financing gaps. Since 2019, it has channeled more than $800,000 into conservation efforts, creating sustainable economic incentives for smallholders while preserving critical ecosystems.
ForestLink
ForestLink: Real-Time Forest Monitoring & Inclusive Decision-Making for Biodiversity. Innovative & low-tech, our ForestLink tech empowers Indigenous people & local communities to monitor tropical forests where they live in real-time, reducing deforestation & protecting human rights & the environment. Using just a mobile phone, forest communities can report illegal activities via satellite, even from remote areas, putting power back in their hands. ForestLink leverages their unique knowledge to defend their rights & influence extractive industries. Being a highly adaptable tool, ForestLink is currently deployed in 5 countries, where it covers a range of issues, e.g. GBV, land rights violations, forest illegalities etc. Data collection can be adapted for smartphones, or simply via SMS, ensuring access to the most remote communities. ForestLink is developed & used in accordance with a rights-based approach & in line with the principles of consent & do-no-harm. Any use of data is in accordance with survivor-centred principles.
Management of Access and Benefit-Sharing (ABS) Resources in the Rio Iratapuru Sustainable Development Reserve (RDS)
In the mid-2000s, the Rio Iratapuru Sustainable Development Reserve (RDS), a protected area combining Amazon forest conservation and sustainable use by traditional communities, hosted the first recognized bioprospecting initiative in Amapá. The São Francisco do Iratapuru community, represented by the COMARU cooperative, signed Brazil’s first Benefit-Sharing Agreement (ABS) with Natura and the State Government (via SEMA/AP), involving the use of breu-branco (Protium pallidum), which led to the launch of the “Perfume do Breu” in 2004. A fund was then created to manage the benefit-sharing resources, initially administered by Natura. The community accessed these funds through projects, but with limited autonomy. With Federal Law 13.123/2015, management shifted in 2018 to COMARU itself, supported by a participatory Steering Committee. Funded projects have since included community infrastructure improvements, strengthening of value chains, and local training, fostering transparency, social protagonism, and positive impacts in RDS.
Siembra y cosecha de agua de lluvia frente a la sequía en la Microcuenca de Huacrahuacho
Esta solución se implementó en la microcuenca Huacrahuacho, ubicada en un ecosistema altoandino llamado Puna sobre los 3.800 msnm. Se diseñó frente a los problemas de sequía y disminución de fuentes de agua, durante la época seca, para el consumo humano y el uso agropecuario. Tuvo como objetivos: captar, almacenar e infiltrar agua y recargar los acuíferos; incrementar/mantener el caudal de los manantiales; generar un microclima con mayor humedad; y conservar la biodiversidad.
La qocha, palabra quechua que significa laguna pequeña, fue el centro de un conjunto de medidas que incorporan forestación, zanjas de infiltración, manejo de pasturas naturales y acequias colectoras o aductoras.
Gracias a estas medidas construidas por las familias y a nivel comunal, se cuenta con más agua durante las épocas de estiaje, lo que ha permitido la recuperación de pastos naturales para la producción ganadera y un cambio hacia un paisaje más húmedo con mayor biodiversidad y belleza paisajística.
Conservación de páramos y bosques altoandinos para recuperar la regulación hídrica en la cuenca
Los escenarios de cambio climático en la Región Piura, anuncian escasez en la oferta hídrica, lo cual afectará a la población tanto en la parte alta (comunidad) como en la parte baja de la cuenca (usuarios del agua para riego). La solución contribuye a mejorar la resiliencia a través de acciones de conservación en los bosques de neblina y páramos (ecosistemas de montaña eficientes en la retención de agua) en la Comunidad de Samanga, para lo cual cuenta con un Área de Conservación “Bosques de Neblina y Páramos de Samanga” y su respectivo Plan de Manejo Participativo. Asimismo, se ha mejorado la capacidad adaptativa a través de acuerdos entre la comunidad y los usuarios – regantes, los que contribuyen a la sostenibilidad de las acciones de conservación (incluyendo fortalecimiento de capacidades y de desarrollo sostenible). Con esto, se busca recuperar y mantener el servicio de regulación hídrica de la cuenca del río Quiroz, sobre todo la oferta de agua en la parte baja.
How a real estate project can ensure longterm financing for the conservation of a wilderness area
Through a real estate project “Reserva Ecologica Oasis de la Campana” it is possible to protect 1000 hectares of sclerophyllous forest of Mediterranean ecosystem. The project destines a sector that is subdivided into properties of 0.5 hectares for real estate purposes and another sector of 1000 hectares to conservation of Mediterranean forest and its biodiversity. Through the legal framework of reciprocal environmental easements between the parcels of the real estate sector and the area destined for conservation and the delivery of these lands to a non-profit Foundation, the legal protection in perpetuity of the 1000 hectares is ensured. On the other hand, this same legal framework ensures that the common expenses of the owners of the real estate subdivision finance not only the maintenance of their common areas but also the maintenance activities of the wilderness area to be conserved. This includes protection and restoration activities.