Since Mossy Earth's inception, delivering transparency through technology has been a founding pillar. One of the genuine reasons I set up Mossy Earth was that I had previously been donating to organisations but never really knew how my money was being spent. Duarte and I wanted to do things differently and put all our cards on the table. As such, we have tried to build the infrastructure that enables you to easily and independently verify our work and how it translates to impact. Being open and transparent in this way helps us develop trust and to get members engaged with our projects at a deeper level. Here we explain the different measures we take for this to work.
Matt Davies, Co-founder

Every Mossy Earth project starts out with clear objectives for the ecosystems and species it targets. These objectives are researched and designed by our conservation biologists or co-designed with partners, applying a results-based approach integrated with conservation evidence. To understand how we select, design, monitor and report our project outcomes, see our Rewilding and Conservation Evidence methodologies. Following these approaches allows us to report, with more confidence, when a project has a meaningful impact on an ecosystem and/or species. Only after this happens, do we display it on our Transparency dashboard.

From a top-level view of our impact down to a granular perspective of each action and cost, our Transparency dashboard helps you to follow everything we’ve ever done. We've divided it into four different areas.

At an ecosystem level, we show the ecosystem groups our work is impacting and how much area is affected overall. We have separated ecosystems into the following groups: forest, freshwater, grassland, dryland, marine and coastal. Each ecosystem group is broken down into ecosystem types. For instance, so far our work covers these forest ecosystems: temperate mixed forest; temperate deciduous forest; temperate coniferous forest; riparian woodland; birch woodland; montane woodland; and oak wood pasture. You can drill down even more from there. For each ecosystem type, we show:

a breakdown of impacts on the ecosystem, i.e. enrichment planting of riparian woodlands

This way, you can see our cumulative on the ground action and the resulting impact on the ecosystem as a whole.

2. Directly and Indirectly Targeted Species

We aim to have a wide impact on biodiversity and ecological function through our projects but often the interventions are expected to benefit individual species, some directly and some indirectly. In terms of reporting our impact, we decided to show all the directly impacted species and a selection of indirectly impacted ones.

Grouping species is done through the following categories: plant, invertebrate, bird, mammal, amphibian, fish, reptile and fungi. Each group is summed by total number of different species, along the total number of projects that target them. To learn more about a particular species, select it to see which projects have helped them and how. Test your knowledge of species' scientific names by hovering over the text to see the difference between a species' common and latin name. There are hundreds of species already recorded on the dashboard. Explore to your heart's content!

Every quarter, we publish a report to provide you with an overview of how our fundraising is coming along. We outline the highlights of each period including our total number of members, the value of our combined contributions and how much of this goes to its intended purpose. You will also see the detail behind our calculations of our monthly rewilding budget.

Track everything that happens on the ground at our projects in this section of the dashboard. Every month, our biologists report back on all activity from out in the field. Whether that’s conducting baseline surveys, removing invasive species or reintroducing species. This table displays all the actions being carried out to progress towards project outcomes. It is purely a record of these events. For more information, members receive an Action Impact Card in their account describing the intervention in more detail. 

Project costs are reported on our Transparency dashboard to show all costs incurred during a project’s lifetime. The types of costs vary depending on the project but we generally receive invoices for equipment, materials, travel, staffing and specific interventions like earthworks, which are all described within the budgets of our project management plans. Similar to project actions, project costs appear in a more descriptive format in the membership account.

Our Transparency dashboard is available for everyone to access.

Regular Project Updates Using a Variety of Mediums

Every project has its own story. Keeping you involved at each stage of these stories is an essential part of being transparent. To do this in an engaging, accessible and accurate way, we have chosen a variety of different mediums. This includes:

Regular full-length YouTube project videos

On the ground vlogs to report project actions

360° before and after photos of project sites

Weekly progress updates written by our biologists (where members can join in the conservation)

We strive to give you a clear picture of what is happening. This means sharing our successes but also being frank when things don’t go according to plan. Working under these values is one way we aim to demonstrate our commitment to being open and transparent.

Clear Impact Reporting: Individual Member Impact

We are an action and results oriented team and believe many of our community are motivated in similar ways. With this in mind, we knew it was important to somehow capture every individual member’s impact on nature with us. 

As part of the membership account, individuals and businesses can track their impact on nature through a personalised dashboard. This provides members with an overview of their impact on ecosystems and species. Information is presented so members can see the split of ecosystems by type and the total number of species from each species group (with images).

Project actions are also displayed in the account allowing members to follow all the fieldwork they support each month. These Action Cards provide a description of on the ground events with imagery. Additionally, members receive monthly Cost Cards and Project Pot Cards. Both describe how we have spent or intend to spend our membership funds on projects. 

In this section, we explain where to dive deeper and explore the inner workings of our projects. 

Firstly, on our project pages we outline the story - a timeline of events, why the ecosystems and species we’re targeting are important, the cost of inaction, as well as our plan and vision for the project. 

Within the page you can find our project management plans. These documents detail all the considerations of planning a project such as:

The project’s position in relevance to wider projects

GPS coordinates (where it is not sensitive to share) 

Detailed habitat and species information with relevant legislation

Detailed Maps, Tree Imagery & GPS Coordinates

For each and every one of our planting areas, we map the area and record the number of trees planted and the species mix. We also provide GPS coordinates, drone flyover footage, and aerial 360° images of the planting areas, which is available on our maps on each reforestation project page. 

Our aim is for users to be able to see where trees have been planted and how that fits in with the wider landscape restoration efforts. There is also the possibility for any member or customer to visit the planting area themselves and verify in person that the trees have been planted. Some of them are quite a way out there in the wilderness but it makes for a fun hike!

For logistical and financial reasons, we plant our trees in batches in seasonal planting periods and always finish assigning each batch of trees before moving on to the next batch to ensure additionality. For practical reasons, we are only able to provide the video footage and imagery of one planting area - the area where the majority of trees are being assigned.

To supplement the project information available to you, we introduce new projects in an interview with our project managers. This format of content gives you the chance to hear the thoughts of our teams working on the project. Our biologists let you in on why they investigated this particular intervention and their expectations for the project. These podcasts are produced as videos accessible via the membership account. 

Yasuní Rainforest Project - PROJECT DISCUSSION

To close the transparency and accountability loop, we invite members to contribute opinions and we make ourselves available in the following ways.

We want to give our members a voice on the direction Mossy Earth should take on key issues. As such, we ask for members’ approval or disapproval of our reporting and gather opinions on important questions in membership votes. The idea is to make the membership more democratic in the long run so our vision is aligned with our closest supporters. Through this approach, we feel we can have the greatest impact together.

We also make in-depth videos to share and discuss the results of the vote and to reply to our members' most burning questions. These long form videos are the place to go if you are curious to know (in more depth) how we are thinking about our work and why we make certain decisions.

We love learning that our projects stoke curiosity and hearing thoughts on them. If you have a question or simply want to reach out, feel free to get in touch through email, social media, our discord or via the membership account. In the account, you can engage in conservation with our biologists and community to discuss topics raised in the project updates. Finally, there is the option for members to book a good old-fashioned call with one of the team, we love to chat to members!

The growth of our community has brought fresh eyes and numerous suggestions on how we can improve our work and its reporting. We have welcomed this and have implemented the transparency dashboard, membership vote and membership report as additional transparency and accountability measures to act on these suggestions.

There is still work to be done, however, to get to the level of transparency we hope to have. New ideas we are currently working on include satellite monitoring for area-based projects and hiring an external accounting firm to audit our spending. For now, if you have any questions, reach out and we will be happy to help.

We take transparency and accountability very seriously. In addition to our current measures, we have quite a few ambitious features we are working on. 

Transparency and Accountability

The aims of rewilding resonate with a lot of people. Our rewilding projects are a way to translate this enthusiasm into concrete actions that restore degraded ecosystems, enable ecosystem processes or enhance biodiversity. We have developed a rewilding project development process that aims to ensure that our members' support has the greatest possible impact. Here, we let you in on this process so you can understand how we work and feel confident that these projects are worthwhile.

Rewilding to us means restoring degraded ecosystems, enabling ecosystem processes and enhancing biodiversity. 

Broadly speaking, we can divide Mossy Earth projects into two broad categories: Mossy Earth funded projects and Mossy Earth led projects. 

In many of our rewilding projects you’ll see us working with different local conservation organisations, helping them fund on the ground activities such as Red Kite reintroductions. Alongside these, we are also starting to develop projects led by our own conservation biologists with the vision of creating what we like to call our rewilding hubs. An example of this is our Native Oyster restoration project in Scotland, and there are more in the pipeline!

To be suitable, the project must aim to achieve one or more of these objectives that are central to rewilding:

Restore biodiversity and/or abundance of native species

Restore key ecosystem processes (e.g., flooding, migration, herbivory, predation)

Improve habitat integrity and connectivity

Protect unique and threatened ecosystems and species

Can achieve outcomes that are stable in the long term. This means intervention rationale has to be sound from an ecological perspective but also that the project is sustainable in a socio-cultural context through stakeholder participation and engagement where relevant. 

Carry out interventions that are well supported by existing evidence and/or are designed in such a way that allows the effectiveness of such interventions to be tested. 

Additionally, we also consider whether projects add value in other ways that go beyond their primary objectives such as:

Generating knowledge or innovation that opens the door for larger scale and more cost effective interventions in the future. 

Achieving broader socio-economic and environmental benefits, such as:

Providing economic value to local communities (e.g. by promoting ecotourism or providing ecosystem services).

Protecting local communities from the negative impacts of invasive species, extreme weather events, soil degradation and desertification.

Is the ecological problem and proposed solution supported by sound scientific evidence and ecological theory?

Interventions on an ecosystem can have cascading consequences on many species and processes. This is exactly the reason rewilding projects are a powerful tool for restoration. However, this complexity often makes it difficult to predict the impact of an intervention. Therefore, a good rewilding project will back up predictions with scientific evidence and acknowledge remaining uncertainties. 

If the rewilding project aims to implement a novel intervention for which there is limited empirical evidence, the rationale should be based on ecological theory and properly referenced. In this situation, it is crucial to evaluate unwanted impacts and how to deal with them should they occur (see adaptive approach below). Although it may be tempting to focus only on scaling up well studied interventions, we think innovation is necessary if we are to reap the full potential of rewilding. Therefore, we also value well thought out research projects that will provide the evidence we need to make rewilding efforts more effective.  

In all cases, we also consider what would happen if we did not support the project to understand if there really is a clear cost of inaction. By assessing additionality in this way, we can assess the positive impact of the actions we undertake with the support of our members.

Does the project fit with the rewilding goals of Mossy Earth?

Since the early days of Mossy Earth, we have been trying to identify and implement actions that achieve the greatest possible impact to restore nature with the funds we have available. Every rewilding project we undertake or support we do so with the big picture in mind. As a team, we set out our rewilding goals and priorities for the year and use this to guide our research and management decisions. Our vision is based on two key principles : Maximising diversity & Maximising impact

We strive for a diverse portfolio that spans countries and themes. This helps ensure that our members’ impact reaches across ecosystems, landscapes, and species. It also allows us to raise awareness about a wide array of ecological issues and make interesting connections, maximising opportunities for learning. That said, in order to deliver robust and well thought out projects, we don’t want to spread ourselves too thin so we prioritise areas and types of projects. Firstly, we prioritise projects at our rewilding hubs in the United Kingdom and Iberia where our biologists are based. They understand the local ecosystems and cultural landscape, and can be more involved in or run the projects directly. We also prioritise projects we think will provide our members with the biggest bang for their buck. We prioritise rewilding projects that help combat climate change, have cascading impacts across ecosystems, and/or save threatened but under-funded species from extinction. In general, we only support projects that make sense within the context of our rewilding vision.

As we continue to grow, we are working hard to make sure we have the systems in place to work towards our vision at scale. To achieve this, we have distilled what we have learned so far and poured it into a new project development protocol designed to ensure that: 

1. We gather good project opportunities. 

2. We have an effective process to select which of these opportunities to focus on.  

3. We develop a project management plan that is robust but not overly time consuming for our partners.

4. We generate and use scientific evidence effectively.

This protocol, which we outline in more detail here, takes project ideas from their origin through to assessment during which we gather key pieces of information that allow us to score them and use a multi-criteria analysis to compare to other opportunities. If a project passes this assessment, this then leads on to planning, through to implementation and monitoring, and ultimately evidence sharing. Below we discuss two of the criteria we consider in relation to project design:

Are the actual drivers of ecological degradation addressed?

For projects to be successful in the long term, it is important that the problems that led to the original issue are addressed. For example, efforts to reintroduce a top predator in an area where its demise was the result of a declining prey population are bound to fail if prey numbers don’t increase. Similarly, if human-wildlife conflict was the issue that originally drove a species away, measures must be in place to mitigate this problem.

Will Mossy Earth funding be essential for the project to go ahead?

To ensure we achieve as much as possible with the funds we have, it is not enough to know the ecological outcomes of what we do. To understand if our support was truly needed, we also must evaluate the likelihood that these outcomes would be achieved even if we did not get involved. Part of this comes down to the issue we are focusing on. Projects that tackle neglected problems such as the plight of less charismatic organisms or promising but unexplored opportunities tend to have greater additionality. 

Another important angle is to consider the funding structure and the likelihood of there being alternative sources of funding available to implement the project. When the total project budget is covered by us, we can be more confident that our involvement was decisive. However, we also establish co-funding partnerships with other organisations when this allows for more ambitious projects to be implemented than if everyone worked separately. This is often important to get larger projects off the ground, such as species reintroductions or those that require considerable engineering or construction work, for example dam removal or wetland creation.

We work independently or with our partners to design a management plan for each project, where we outline the project objectives, activities, timelines and expected outputs. Within this document we also delve into matters such as cultural considerations, stakeholder engagement and wildlife ethics. This document forms the foundation of our management decisions throughout the course of the project. 

Also included within the management plan is the monitoring strategy. This includes details about how and when monitoring activities will take place to find if project outcomes are being achieved. However, the type and extent of monitoring varies widely from project to project. In some cases baseline surveys and ongoing monitoring are needed to inform the intervention itself while in other cases monitoring is only required to evaluate the success of the project. In each case, we have to compare the value of the information we obtain through a monitoring activity against the impact we could achieve if we allocated the same funds elsewhere. Achieving this balance is no easy task but, broadly speaking, the extent of monitoring should increase as:

The uncertainty around the effectiveness of the intervention increases. In these cases, fewer assumptions can be made about expected outcomes and a more thorough monitoring approach is likely to generate information which could be of benefit to similar projects in the future.

The budget increases leading to greater financial risk. 

The probability for unintended consequences is high because of ecological or social risk(s).

The need for monitoring to inform decisions increases (adaptive management).

This should help us avoid two wasteful traps that can often beset projects:

Carrying out interventions for which there is limited evidence that they will be effective without having a sufficiently thorough monitoring approach to determine if it was effective or not - a trial designed in a way that allows for scientific inferences to be made would be more appropriate. 

Spending large amounts of time and money on monitoring an intervention that is tried and tested and for which there is already ample evidence demonstrating it will be effective - a simpler plan using some key indicators or proxy measures would be more appropriate.

In our Conservation Evidence methodology you can learn more about how this fits into our approach to using and generating evidence.

Once a project has started we do our best to take our members on the journey that is the implementation of an exciting rewilding project by:

Creating one short video interview, otherwise known as a project podcast, with the Mossy Earth biologist in charge to introduce the project to members. We will then select some projects for in depth YouTube videos that you can find on our channel.

Keeping members up to date with the progress and sharing impact cards whenever there is an on-the-ground action, cost or project pot contribution (when we set aside money for a project) through the membership account. 

Updating members on our projects in personal, in-depth feed posts on the membership account and sharing monthly field reports via email. 

Helping people get a better perspective of how our rewilding projects are financed by sharing a quarterly report. Members are also given the opportunity to answer key questions on our rewilding projects in regular membership votes. Learn more about all our transparency measures in our trust and transparency methodology.

Making sure that all on-the-ground activities, expenses, and summary metrics about our impact are detailed on our newly launched transparency dashboard.

To make sure we are kept up to date with project outcomes, monitoring and spending, we have created a reporting template to be used by our project partners to construct either a progress report or a final report depending on the project timeline.

A significant amount of our rewilding work relies on the use of technology. Some of the tools we commonly use in our projects are camera traps, GPS tags, environmental DNA (eDNA) and drones.

Camera traps are a non-invasive tool, placed systematically or randomly in the field to capture images or videos of the local wildlife or target species. These cameras can be used to gather species lists for an area, species richness estimates, behavioural data and even estimates of population size.

As organisms interact with the surrounding environment, they leave traces of their DNA. This is known as eDNA, and it can be collected from samples of freshwater, saltwater, soil and even air. An emerging and valuable tool, it can be used to detect organisms that are difficult to find using other methods. We’ve used it to detect invasive species and establish invertebrate and vertebrate diversity within lakes and ponds at a rewilded mining site in Portugal, amongst other things!

We are also using drones to create high resolution maps that can provide very useful information about the ecosystems we are working to restore. For example, we have used them to monitor plants in hard to access locations, map potential snail habitat and assess the spatial arrangement of termite mounds and trees across the landscape. 

All of this technology is very exciting and can be very useful, but it can also be a distraction if not used well. This is where our approach to using and generating evidence comes in which you can read all about in our Conservation Evidence methodology.

One of the challenges in nature restoration is that ecosystems are very complex, and we often must integrate different kinds of evidence to come up with interventions that work. For a given decision, evidence may come from peer reviewed papers, databases, project reports, practitioner and expert knowledge, local and indigenous knowledge and citizen science to list some of the sources.

We decided to tackle this challenge head on by setting up a partnership with Conservation Evidence, an ambitious project that aims to provide a “free, authoritative information resource designed to support decisions about how to maintain and restore global biodiversity”. We will be working with their team, based at the University of Cambridge, to improve the way we use and create evidence about our projects. Here are some of the reasons we are very excited about this:

Better use of evidence can improve project outcomes.

Using more structured approaches to decision making will make it easier for us to share the rationale behind them and get feedback from our members and project stakeholders.

Improving our approach to cost reporting will help us better track the cost-effectiveness of our work. This can also prove useful for other organisations pursuing similar projects or for seeking ways to reduce costs.

Optimising how we create and share new evidence through our projects will help us ensure that we are not only having a direct impact on these ecosystems but also creating a knowledge base that will inform future projects.

Finally, by making progress in this direction, we hope to inspire other organisations to do the same.

We will keep updating this page as we make progress towards these goals.

We have developed a rewilding project development process that aims to ensure that our members' support has the greatest possible impact. Learn all about how we select, implement and report our rewilding projects.

Rewilding Methodology

The process behind our rewilding projects

There are a wide range of opportunities to restore nature that are available for us to explore. However, ensuring we select the ideas that align with our goals and strategy to have the most impact possible is not always straightforward. To identify, assess and plan our rewilding projects more effectively, we have created a project development protocol to concentrate our efforts on the most suitable opportunities. These are the stages we follow to achieve this.

Getting an influx of good project ideas is an essential part of our project development protocol and selection process. We get suggestions from our community and we also ensure our current project partners understand which actions we look to support so they can send us suitable ideas. Sometimes ongoing projects also open up new avenues to pursue. On top of this, our conservation biologists research new areas where our member’s funding can go a long way, such as neglected issues and those where simple interventions lead to widespread ecological benefits.

After an initial check by our conservation biologists to see if the idea fits our goals and strategy, we move on to collect key details to determine if we should pursue it further. This is done through a concept note form that is filled in by the project team.

The next step of the process is to run the potential project through our scoring and selection system. We have defined the criteria that we consider most important to our decision process and we score the project for each of these criteria (summarised in this table):

We explored a few ways of using these criteria but found that adding scores to give a final ranking created challenges in weighting and ranking the criteria and whether scores were linear and equidistant. We didn’t want to lose the nuance of which categories were the deciding factors so our scoring process has taken the form of a multi-criteria analysis which is considered to be more appropriate for these situations. It's particularly useful where you have a number of good alternatives to choose from and many different factors to take into account, which is a situation we frequently find ourselves in as Mossy Earth grows. 

Since we developed this approach, we are finding that it allows us to clearly identify the trade-offs between different project options. In some cases, it has even strengthened the project design where weakness and solutions could be identified. The goal is for the tool to continue to evolve and improve as we use it.

Once we decide we want to go ahead with a project, the planning process starts. If the project is led by one of our biologists, they are the ones writing the management plan with the help of relevant experts and stakeholders as needed. If the project is led by one of our partners, they are the ones writing the plan, which then gets reviewed by our biologists in an iterative process. This is where the project management plan is evaluated in detail including:

The rationale for how the intervention is expected to influence the system and lead to lasting change.

The evidence there is to support important claims within that rationale.

How and when outcomes should be achieved and monitored.

The final document is meant to provide a clear description of the why, how and when of the project actions and monitoring activities as well as other key details about the project. Here is an example of a management plan.

A key mechanism we use to ensure that we are held accountable is to be clear about our objectives for a project before we start and to make this information publicly available. 

We do this by sharing the management plans on our project pages and explaining the goals in our project videos. This is comparable to the pre-registration of scientific articles where researchers specify the hypothesis they intend to test before actually carrying out their research which can help improve the validity of research findings. In our case, it means that we effectively commit to sharing all project outcomes and any lessons learned rather than cherry picking cases for positive results.

Learn how we find, assess and plan our rewilding projects through our project development protocol.

Project Selection Protocol

How we find, assess and plan our rewilding projects

Restoring ecosystems and biodiversity in a cost-effective way is at the core of what we aim to do at Mossy Earth. An important part of how we seek to achieve this is by using and generating scientific evidence. We continuously make complex decisions on if and how to intervene in nature. We believe we will be able to achieve much more with our limited resources if these decisions integrate the best available evidence. Other fields, such as medicine, recognised the limitations of relying solely on subjective judgements and anecdotal evidence which prompted a transition to integrating the latest scientific evidence into decision making that vastly improved healthcare outcomes. We believe a similar paradigm shift is happening in the world of conservation and ecological restoration. We want to be a part of it by integrating these principles into our work on the ground.

Although the emphasis is on scientific evidence, we borrow a definition of evidence as: ‘relevant information used to assess one or more assumptions related to a question of interest’. This includes peer reviewed studies, reports as well as citizen science observations and local knowledge. 

The key for us is that there is clarity about how important assumptions are justified. In this view, the value of expertise or local knowledge is that it allows relevant evidence to be found, integrated, contextualised and applied effectively and not that it provides a justification for a certain course of action in and of itself.

Our Collaboration with Conservation Evidence

To help us put these principles into practice, we have established a partnership with the Conservation Evidence team at the University of Cambridge. They have been spearheading the movement towards evidence-based conservation from the very beginning by arguing for its importance and providing very useful free resources that make it easier to put into practice. 

We are part of their Evidence Champions programme and they have helped us design our current approach to selecting, planning and monitoring our projects. Below, we outline the key points where evidence comes into what we do. If you’d like additional context, check out our broader rewilding methodology.

Reviewing evidence for key project assumptions

It is part of our approach to developing new projects to question what the evidence base is as early as possible. This is important because it encourages us to consider steering project design before a lot of effort has been put into a specific course of action. 

First the project team explains rationale for how the proposed action will lead to long term ecological change and how this compares to a scenario where nothing is done. Then, we identify the key claims and assumptions being made within this rationale and work with the project team to clarify what evidence there is to support each of them. Although it takes a bit longer than simply laying out a plan, the outcome of this process is usually a great investment. 

If we find that there is robust evidence for each claim and the rationale is very sound, the management plan becomes a very clear justification for the chosen course of action. This can help gather buy-in from stakeholders and allows us to communicate more effectively about the project. On the other hand, if there is limited evidence to support some of the key claims or assumptions, the project team can seek alternative actions to achieve the same objectives. Alternatively it may be possible to use an experimental design that allows new evidence to be generated to test the assumptions that are on shaky grounds. If done correctly, this process should allow us to ensure that every project delivers impact, allows us to learn an important lesson or both.

The other side of the coin is that we believe generating and sharing scientific evidence itself can be a form of impact when it helps make future projects more successful. It can reveal information about an ecosystem or about the effectiveness of a given action that directly influences the design of future projects. 

What is particularly exciting is that if we make this information easily available to others following open access principles, we can go beyond improving the way we run our projects and actually help others do the same. An important step we have taken to put this into practice is that we dedicate a section in our project management plans to outline what evidence may result from the project, and how and where it will be analysed, synthesised and shared.

We also do our best to share negative results when things don’t go as planned. This is very important because it can help prevent others from repeating any mistakes we have made or at least help them calibrate their expectations of success if they pursue a similar action. 

An important yet simple way that prevents us from contributing to publication bias is to be clear about our objectives for a project before we start and to make this information publicly available. We do this by sharing the management plan for the project and explaining our goals in our project pages and YouTube videos. This is comparable to the pre-registration of scientific articles where researchers specify the hypothesis they intend to test before actually carrying out their research, which can help improve the validity of research findings. This prevents us from cherry-picking success stories from our project portfolio and means that sharing any mistakes or failures is the status quo. 

We believe that one of the best ways to generate useful evidence is by combining research and practice. Practitioners bring in an understanding of the social and ecological context surrounding an action and an awareness of what knowledge gaps most affect their ability to deliver impact. They will also most often be the ones with the financial and technical capacity to test ecological interventions at scale. Researchers on the other hand can bring in scientific expertise and the ability to design robust experiments that will advance our understanding of what works best.

However, this type of knowledge co-production is often neglected, perhaps because the two groups have distinct priorities and incentives. Practitioners may under-appreciate the value of using more robust approaches to testing interventions and favour acting fast and using simpler study designs even if these are at greater risk of producing inaccurate results. This is made easier by the fact that impact is often assessed by funders and stakeholders that don’t have the skills or inclination to evaluate study design and to demand more robust testing of interventions.  On the other side of the spectrum, publishing a study that compares the effectiveness of two ecological interventions may prove to be very useful for practitioners but not be very attractive to a researcher whose career trajectory would benefit more from focusing on making a more impressive scientific breakthrough. 

There are of course numerous research groups, private and public organisations that do excellent work on this front. In our role as practitioners and funders, we think we can help move things in the right direction by looking for opportunities to keep adding bricks to the bridge between research and practice.

There is still a lot of room for improvement in terms of our approach to using and generating evidence and we have identified some challenges as we make progress on this front. We believe these areas that require more attention from us are worth sharing. 

One of the challenges we face is the absence of comprehensive baseline data for the species or ecosystems we are focusing on.  In some of these cases, designing the project in a way that allows us to infer cause and effect may require us to postpone implementation and increase the overall project budget. Choosing if that’s the appropriate thing to do is not always straightforward as we have to weigh up how confident we are that the action will be effective (based on existing evidence); how urgent the intervention is; and and how important it is for us to rule out any confounding factors in this particular instance. 

Ecological change typically occurs over extended periods of time. This means that actually demonstrating change requires a commitment to long term monitoring that can be difficult to fund and organise.

Causal inference becomes challenging when multiple interventions are carried out simultaneously or when the approach changes as the project progresses. This is common in landscape scale rewilding projects where multiple issues are addressed simultaneously to maximise impact.

Developing more robust experimental designs often requires additional time and resources for planning, monitoring, and data analysis and this is not always possible to arrange. 

Advances in technology, such as drones, satellite monitoring, artificial intelligence (AI), and environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis, offer great potential for enhancing our ability to gather data cost-effectively. Drones and satellite monitoring provide valuable tools for mapping and monitoring ecosystems at various scales, enabling us to collect spatially explicit data on habitat characteristics, species distributions, and landscape changes. AI algorithms can assist in processing and analyzing large datasets, identifying patterns, and making predictions, thereby accelerating our understanding of complex ecological systems. Furthermore, eDNA analysis allows us to detect the presence of species in environmental samples, offering a non-invasive and efficient method for biodiversity monitoring over time.

We are already using many of these tools in our projects and we expect they will become more important over time. As the cost of data collection goes down, the case for evidence based practice will only grow stronger. Having said this, we think it is important not to get carried away by the excitement of these new technologies. In many cases, the most cost-effective approach will be to use a simple low tech monitoring protocol. 

The recently published open access book which is our go to when it comes to embedding evidence into conservation decision making.

The open access online database created by the Conservation Evidence team which allows users to quickly evaluate the evidence about the effectiveness of thousands of conservation actions.

A discussion of how to bridge the research practice gap.

A study making the case for the importance of robust experimental design to assess the effect of actions.

Understand our approach to using and generating evidence in our rewilding projects.

Conservation Evidence

Our approach to using and generating evidence

Mossy Earth has as its main objective to create independent and sustainable long-term funding mechanisms for impactful rewilding and conservation projects. Our core focus is to help restore, protect and enhance a wide range of important and threatened wild ecosystems through a process that is transparent and enjoyable for our members.

The choices we made when setting up Mossy Earth were premeditated and follow a reasoning which we want to explain further in this methodology. This is an in-depth breakdown of how we think, so be ready for a long read!

We are incorporated as a private limited company in the United Kingdom. We are not a charity and the Mossy Earth membership is not a donation.

There are many reasons why we chose to incorporate as a company instead of an NGO or charity. However, before we get into the nitty gritty, I would like to note that this is simply our choice. It’s how we feel we can have the greatest impact, not about how others should manage their projects. There are many fantastic NGOs out there including many of our rewilding partners so please keep that in mind when reading the rest of this methodology, this is about us.

NGOs are different from normal companies and the government in two crucial ways. Firstly, an NGO does not pay taxes and its revenues or investments are tax deductible. Secondly, NGOs are privately managed, and their spending is not subject to management by democratically elected individuals. This mechanism is something that Matt, who co-founded Mossy Earth, and me find flawed and decided to avoid for our organisation.

The concept of an NGO became widespread as a solution to appease the anger at the significant inequality between the factory workers and the first industrial capitalists of the 19th century who accumulated extreme levels of wealth. By creating an entity seen as a benevolent redistributor of welfare, the wealthy individuals that first came up with this concept were perceived as great benefactors to society, whilst still controlling exactly how their money was spent. This is something that persists to this day. “Winner’s take all” by Anand Giridharadas covers this issue as well as other problems with NGOs and social enterprises.

It goes without saying that, when used correctly, the NGO model can achieve amazing results, it just did not feel like the right structure for us.

Someone who accumulates wealth is usually taxed significantly more than the average citizen. Their tax payments are then added to government budgets and spent by the elected individuals in government at that time. This process ensures, or at least tries to ensure, that the money accumulated through everyone’s contribution is spent democratically. By this we mean that the elected individuals should follow the programs on which they were elected and thus the resulting policies should be the closest to what most of the population wants. In practice, this management is far from perfect and not always democratic, but it's something we can work on together. Much like democracy itself, it has its flaws but it’s the best we have.

The tax deductible nature of NGO and charity structures effectively create an alternative and competing mechanism for this process. Wealthy benefactors can avoid taxation and on top of that retain control over their money in some form.

Picture this: You are rich and your investment portfolio is booming. You can expect a hefty tax bill and once the money leaves your account you no longer have control over it and it passes into the hands of the elected government. However, if you were to set up a foundation in your name and then donate to it, you could still sit on the board or be the managing director and effectively call all the shots and do as you please.

The key issue is that by receiving tax deductions for their donations, these individuals can pay less taxes into the pool of money that is managed democratically and instead put their wealth into organisations and causes where they have a higher degree of control. This point is crucial, I think individuals should be able to accumulate fortunes and spend them how they please but this should never be to the detriment of the democratic wealth redistribution mechanisms (taxes). If you want to support a cause why not pay all your taxes first and only then use your money to support your favourite cause? It seems like a no-brainer to me and our organisational structure reflects this.

Proudly bootstrapped and fiercely independent

Regular limited companies also have many flaws and some can get in the way of impact in the long run. Let’s address some.

Who owns a business defines the priorities in the long run. In recent years we have seen a rush to plant trees and capitalise on the interest in nature restoration. This leads to the rise of many for profit carbon offsetting and climate solution companies. Often these companies receive tens of millions in investment which then begs the question is this an investment which expects a return? I would bet my trusty blue hat that they do. This creates some pressure and might misalign incentives in the long run. It also leads to a lot of corner cutting. Many of these organisations are mere middleman that take a cut and move money along. What is the point? I think if you are doing something you should add real value and do things properly yourself.

We are not owned by any fancy investors or a singular rich person and thus not beholden to any external influence. Me and Matt started Mossy Earth with 300 euros and have taken our time to grow sustainably without cutting corners. Our team owns 100% of Mossy Earth and that will never change. 

We are proudly bootstrapped and fiercely independent and intend to stay that way.

Now you know who owns Mossy Earth but this does not prevent us from spending our funding in inappropriate ways. Which is why transparency and accountability are key.

We have a whole methodology written about this (it is longer than this one I’m afraid). If I had to summarise it to give you a taste, I would say the following: 

The public is quite used to reports showcasing how much money was raised and how it was spent. This can provide some insight but does not actually guarantee or prove the on the ground impact. It only tells you how the money was spent and not what the resulting impact was.

Our goal is to not only report how we spend our money (which we do in a database and in quarterly reports) but also build the necessary infrastructure so that every individual that contributes to our projects can verify their impact themselves. This includes publishing detailed management plans for each project, the GPS coordinates of our interventions, any relevant maps, before and after 360-degree photos and on the ground videos. We keep our members up to date with update posts written by our biologists, project podcasts explaining our reasoning in more depth and our YouTube video updates. Our members can review all our actions, transactions and impact in an in-depth transparency dashboard which estimates our impact for each project using a results-based approach in partnership with conservation evidence. Finally, members can vote on certain project decisions and when all the information we put out is not enough, we are always available to chat on a call or on Discord.

Currently, we are working on some additional ideas such as satellite monitoring for area-based projects and hiring an external accounting firm to audit our spending.

Once again, you can read more in our transparency methodology page. Here is a view of our transparency dashboard. 

In closing, there are a few extra reasons why we do things this way:

We focus on creating a service that can stand as a long-term sustainable revenue structure depending on many individuals instead of just one source.

The ability to compete and improve through the market forces us to create a better service.

We believe it is important to showcase that nature and conservation can be considered an economically viable industry through the services sector.

I hope you enjoyed this read and that our reasoning makes sense to you!

Mossy Earth's organisation ethos is to create independent and sustainable long-term funding mechanisms for impactful rewilding & conservation projects.

Methodologies

Transparency and Accountability

Rewilding Methodology

Project Development Protocol

Conservation Evidence

Organisation Ethos