Impact monitoring built on proof, not promises
Every restoration and conservation project sets out to change something measurable on the ground. On our platform explorer.land, monitoring is geo-anchored and satellite-verified, and it’s organised around your Theory of Change rather than a loose set of metrics.
What is impact monitoring for restoration projects?
Impact monitoring is the systematic tracking of whether a restoration or conservation project is producing the ecological and social change it set out to create. It goes beyond recording activities — trees planted, hectares enrolled — to measuring outcomes and verifying them against independent evidence such as satellite imagery. Strong impact monitoring connects what a project does to what actually changes on the ground, over time, in a way that funders, partners and communities can check for themselves.
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
- Monitoring is structured around an interactive Theory of Change — activities, outputs, outcomes and impact connected to the map, not tracked in isolation.
- Earth-observation data layers (forest cover and loss, vegetation, land use change) sit alongside the field data your team already collects.
- A timeline shows how a site changes across months and years — not a single before-and-after snapshot.
- Geo-analytics quantify change inside your actual project boundaries, not a region around them.
- An API lets larger programmes exchange monitoring data between explorer.land and their own systems.
IMPACT MONITORING TOOL
Interactive Theory of Change
- Interactive Theory of Change
- Standard and custom frameworks
- Measured Indicators
- Shareable report
- Measurement notifications
DATA LAYERS
30+ data layers
- Forest Change
- Land Cover and Land Use
- Fires, Biodiversity, Carbon and Soil
- Custom data layers
TIMELINE
Change over time
A single image proves a project exists. A timeline proves it’s working. The timeline view lets you and your stakeholders move through a site’s history — watching canopy return, a firebreak hold, or a degraded parcel recover — so impact reads as a trajectory, not a one-off photo. It’s also what makes early problems visible early, while there’s still time to respond.
- NICFI PlanetLabs
- ESRI Wayback
Connected data
Larger programmes already run their own databases, MRV stacks and reporting pipelines. An API lets explorer.land exchange monitoring data with them, so geo-anchored evidence flows into the systems your organisation already uses — without re-keying or maintaining two sources of truth.
GEO-ANALYTICS TOOL
Insights inside your boundaries
A single image proves a project exists. A timeline proves it’s working. The timeline view lets you and your stakeholders move through a site’s history — watching canopy return, a firebreak hold, or a degraded parcel recover — so impact reads as a trajectory, not a one-off photo. It’s also what makes early problems visible early, while there’s still time to respond.
- NICFI PlanetLabs
- ESRI Wayback
From monitoring to reporting people trust
THEY ALREADY MONITOR THEIR IMPACT
All monitoring features
Timeline
30+ data layers
Evidence visitors can check themselves.
API connection
Connect any third party data
Geo-analytics
Real values calculated on your land.
Impact Monitoring
Goals, indicators and progress, in one place.
Drone footage
3D view
Not sure where to start?
We help you build a Theory of Change you can prove.
- Co-develop your Theory of Change
- Translate goals into measurable outcomes
- Identify the right indicators for each outcome
- Establish baselines and targets
TESTIMONIALS
What partners say about working with us
explorer.land has been pivotal in our restoration work and m&e! 💚🌳
Greenpop
Greenpop's Team
The best thing that has happened to me in 2025 is to start working with OpenForests.
ARARA
Rob de Laet, Project Lead
Estimados amigos, mucho apreciamos nuestra alianza, lo que hemos construido juntos, asì que, ¡Salud por lo que està por venir¡, con todo el ànimo, juntos somos una ola. Todo el èxito, el bosque con nosotros, somos el equipo del Planeta.
GESG
Martha "Pati" Ruiz Corzo, General Director
We truly appreciate the collaboration and what we’ve been building together over time — especially the trust and shared learning behind it.
Sustainable Seeds GmbH
I really love the mobile UI! I know that challenge from Terrastories, and I think you’ve done an excellent job approaching it. I played around with the page and map, and as before, experienced that everything is as intuitive as I expect it to be. Really great stuff!
Amazon Conservation Team
Rudo Kemper, Manager, Mapping & Programs Support
An important part of my role at Greenpop is to authentically and transparently communicate the impact of our work to our donors. explorer.land has helped me visually communicate our work. It has combined many of the goals we have for project communications into an easy-to-use platform. The service we have received from the explorer.land team has been exceptional.
The GreenPop Foundation
Carla Wessels, Partnerships & Communications
ReWild Africa is a storytelling company that sheds light on solutions to ecological restoration. With OpenForests explorer.land we found an incredible valuable map-based tool to connect all story elements, including the films we are producing to a specific project location. This way we enable our clients to tell engaging and transformative stories in a transparent way.
ReWild Africa
Samuel Chevallier, Co-Founder and Director
Since engagement in explorer.land, potential clients, and partners are contacting us. It is a wonderful platform with a super-wide network of potential clients and partners. It has helped us a lot in moving forward with our ecosystem restoration activities. Not only because we can prove exactly what we are doing, but it has also put us in contact with various international clients and partners. The platform really works for us.
Co2 Operate B.V.
Paul Burgers, CEO
OpenForests’ web map has been a fantastic tool to visualize our reforestation project El Silencio for fundraising.
Fundacion Biodiversa Colombia
Fernando Arbeláez, President
