How Many Sites Should I Create on TerraMatch?

As a part of the Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification process for TerraFund, all restoration champions need to create site profiles on TerraMatch for their project. Sites are the fundamental unit for reporting data on TerraMatch. They consist of either a single restoration area or a grouping of restoration areas. This is where you will report your progress, challenges, and successes throughout the project’s monitoring lifespan. All projects must create site profiles on TerraMatch and report progress on each site every six months for the following six years.

You are required to create your site profiles on TerraMatch for all sites where planting will begin during the first reporting period by June 1, 2024. This article will provide step-by-step instructions on how to create a site profile on TerraMatch. You may create additional sites as necessary throughout the two-year planting lifespan of the project. Any time you identify the need for a new site, you must create a new site profile on TerraMatch before the end of that six-month reporting period (January 31 or July 31).

How many sites should I create on TerraMatch?

Sites are the way you’ll organize your reports on tree planting, community engagement, landscape disturbances, and successes, so it’s important that they fit with your project’s organization system.

Keep in mind that you must submit a report for each site every six months. For this reason, we recommend you keep the number of sites to no more than approximately ten, although this is not a strict limit.

Grouping Sites by Location

Each site should represent a general location where you are doing restoration work. These could be villages/communities, wards, counties, or other administrative units, based on the scale of your project. All restoration areas within the same general region, and that are likely to progress in similar ways, should be grouped together into a site.

We recommend you begin your siting process by identifying how many distinct geographies you will be working in. For example, if you have been assigned two forest blocks to restore in two different gazetted forests, you should create two sites. (Each forest should be considered a separate site.) If you are distributing seedlings to smallholder farmers to use for agroforestry in three separate wards, you should create three sites.

Concentrated vs Distributed Sites

There are three main types of project sites that you can use to guide you:

Concentrated sites have fewer, larger contiguous restoration areas where planting (or non-planting interventions) occurs in a consistent manner. Examples of concentrated restoration areas include parcels of gazetted forest designated for restoration by the government, blocks of land owned by your organization, or larger patches of community land. Your project is probably a concentrated project if you are working with fewer than about fifty restoration areas, and the average size of the plot you are restoring is larger than 3 hectares.

Distributed sites have more, smaller restoration areas. Each restoration area typically belongs to an individual landholder (for example a smallholder farmer). An example of a distributed project is one distributing seedlings to many smallholder farmers for agroforestry. Your project is probably a distributed project if you are working with more than about fifty restoration areas, and the average size of each plot you’re restoring is three hectares or smaller.

Hybrid projects are those with restoration areas that would fall into both the concentrated and distributed categories. (For example, a project that is mostly distributing seedlings to individual farmers in five villages but is also working with the community to restore twenty hectares of a degraded community forest.) TerraFund requires different data collection strategies for concentrated and distributed sites. For this reason, if your project is a hybrid project, you must create separate sites for your concentrated and distributed restoration areas. You may create one or multiple concentrated and distributed sites, based on how many locations you’re working in.

How to Name Sites

We recommend you use the name of the geography you used to define your sites (for example, the village, ward, or gazette forest) in your site name. Site names should be concise, descriptive, and follow a consistent naming convention. If you have a concentrated and a distributed site in a similar geographic area, you can use a modifier based on the type of restoration being done to distinguish them. (For example, the hybrid project above might name one of their distributed sites “Village A Agroforestry” and their concentrated site “Village A Community Forest Restoration.”)

To learn more about how to set up your site profiles on TerraMatch, please review this article: How to create a TerraFund project site.