Introducing GrowthTracker: Early Growth Monitoring for ARR Projects

We’re excited to introduce GrowthTracker, a new monitoring service that allows you to monitor early-stage ARR projects remotely and at scale. It acts as an early warning system to flag potential reversals on a monthly basis – giving project teams a chance to intervene before it’s too late.

We believe this is the first, commercial-grade remote sensing solution for this challenge, and I’m thrilled to reveal what our team has been working on. This is a culmination of thousands of hours of team research and work in the past year or so, and will finally address a challenge that has long limited visibility into early-stage removals projects.

Solving a long-standing industry challenge

Monitoring newly planted restoration and reforestation projects has always been tricky. While there are established ways to estimate carbon in mature trees, tracking newly planted saplings has remained a challenge since conventional canopy-height approaches simply can’t differentiate new trees under 5 metres tall from grass and shrubs in the site.

And that’s an issue because newly planted trees are especially vulnerable. The planting can be done poorly. Weeds can come and swamp them. They can be burnt or die through drought. It’s those early few years that really require close monitoring, especially if you’re planting at scale.

Current monitoring solutions are available but limited: you can send a team into the field, or fly drones over the area. You can also buy and track progress through extremely high resolution optical imagery.

But all of these methods have their own failings, which we have heard directly from our clients:

• Site visits can’t be conducted frequently or over the whole area for larger projects.
• Drone runs help with scale, but the data processing load is enormous and inherently challenging and costly.
• Optical imagery by itself doesn’t quantify impact, and getting consistent imagery in cloudy tropics is more luck than skill.

All of these methods are expensive, slow, and hard to scale, especially across large sites or multiple projects.

As a result, investors, developers, and offtakers are essentially operating blind in the first few crucial years of a project and often have to make important decisions without a clear view of what’s really happening on the ground.

GrowthTracker doesn’t mitigate the need for on-the-ground visits for these critical stages of a project, but gives you a consistent and scalable solution to help you direct these and other monitoring efforts to maximise impact.

How GrowthTracker works

GrowthTracker uses satellite radar data backscatter to track tree growth against an expected trajectory. If growth begins to deviate from the expected trajectory, the system raises an alert, giving project teams early warning that something might be wrong, long before conventional monitoring approaches would detect it.

When no deviation is detected, the monthly report confirms that the project is growing on track, providing confidence to ARR stakeholders that their investment is progressing as planned. This also acts as proof of project development and supports due diligence: we can review historical data to confirm planting dates and verify that trees are still growing.

When using GrowthTracker, you’ll receive:

• • Historical Insight: A historical growth report confirming the planting date and how trees have developed since the start of the project
  • Monthly monitoring: Updates to track ongoing performance, including early reversal alerts if growth deviates from expectations, giving teams time to investigate and intervene
  • Granular Reporting: As a remote sensing solution, GrowthTracker can monitor any size of site – but importantly divides sites into up to 1ha sub-parcels to allow for more granular reporting and actioning of potentially affected areas.

Full ARR lifecycle support

GrowthTracker is a part of Space Intelligence’s suite of monitoring for projects covering Growth, Disturbance, Fire, and Carbon.

Space Intelligence’s monitoring suite is complemented by data and tools that help developers rapidly assess NbS project eligibility and carbon crediting, develop high-integrity baselines, and ultimately de-risk the investment in NbS programs.

The solution is already being deployed across various ecological environments, including mangrove restoration and terrestrial ARR projects, with validated success in tracking growth with planting dates from 2018.

A broader market perspective

With demand for ARR credits rising sharply in the last few years as my co-founder Murray noted in his March newsletter, more and more projects will need reliable monitoring. Investors, developers, and offtakers need tools that protect investments, ensure environmental impact, and build confidence in the voluntary carbon market.

GrowthTracker is our solution to help strong ARR projects survive and thrive. 

We think this is a really exciting thing for the forest carbon industry because currently there is no satellite-based solution to monitoring early stage growth of ARR projects. Having spent years developing this novel solution, we think it will make a real difference to the market, and enable more reforestation projects to be successful, which ultimately brings us closer to our mission of restoring and protecting forests across the tropics.

Join our pilot

We’re launching GrowthTracker with a limited pilot, offering a small number of projects the chance to receive historical growth monitoring. If you want to confirm that your trees have been planted and are growing as expected, we’d love to include your project – reach out here. Spaces are limited.

We’re also running a live demo of GrowthTracker next week. I’ll be presenting how the tool works along with Dr Alexis Moyer – you can sign up here.