Three friends and fifteen years of making forest work visible
OpenForests started with a conversation about why good forest projects stay invisible while weak ones attract money. This is how that turned into a company, the mistakes along the way, and where we are now.
A conversation that didn’t end the next morning
Over tea late one evening, Stefan, Patrick and Alexander talked about how business as usual was harming ecosystems and the people who depend on them. Plenty of people have that conversation. The difference was that this time, nobody went back to normal the next day.
Three backgrounds that kept running into the same problem
In Panama and Vietnam, Stefan and Alexander saw “green” investments that drove land speculation, pushed out local communities and looked better on spreadsheets than in the field. Patrick had left academia because it felt too far from real impact.
Stefan Haas
Geoecologist. Worked on reforestation in Panama and Vietnam, and builds the information systems that bring fragmented project data together.
Dr. Patrick Ribeiro
Left academia to get closer to real impact. Started the Umundu Festival for sustainable living, and mapped forest change with open-source drones.
Alexander Watson
Forester with a finance background. Worked on reforestation in Panama and Vietnam, and helps projects explain their impact to ethical investors.
Transparency as the starting point
What brought them together was more than frustration. They believed transparency could guide ethical and effective forest work: if you can see what a project does on the ground, good work gets rewarded and weak claims get questioned.
In 2011 they founded OpenForests as a community built around that idea, working towards resilient, inclusive and regenerative projects.
The drone crashed on day one
There was no product at the start, only skills. Patrick mapped forest change with open-source drones. Stefan built information systems for scattered project data. Alexander helped projects explain their impact to ethical investors.
On the first large contract, in Suriname, the fixed-wing drone crashed on the first day. The team repaired it in the field, then used a second drone to lift the damaged one back out above the canopy.
That mix of field work, improvisation and fixing things as you go still shapes how we work today.
From consulting tools to explorer.land
Project by project, the team’s reach felt too small for the size of the problem. So in 2018 we turned our consulting tools into a map-based platform that any project could use: explorer.land.
Projects use it to map their sites, show what is changing and share progress with funders and partners. It became a SaaS platform in 2020, and by 2025 more than 2,000 projects were on it.
A multidisciplinary team building tools for people who restore ecosystems
- Founded
- 2011
- Founders
- Stefan Haas, Dr. Patrick Ribeiro, Alexander Watson
- Platform
- explorer.land, launched 2018, SaaS since 2020
- Projects on explorer.land
- 2,000+ (2025)
- Team
- Multidisciplinary, remote for 10+ years
- Registered office
- Krefeld, Germany
- 2011OpenForests is founded
- 2012Forest data and consulting
- 2014Custom forest data and software development
- 2017The team becomes multidisciplinary
- 2018explorer.land launches
- 2020explorer.land becomes a SaaS platform
- 20231,000+ projects on explorer.land
- 20252,000+ projects on explorer.land
What we believe about people, nature and transparency.
How we hire and what it’s like on the team.
