Grouping Restoration Areas into Sites on TerraMatch

This article provides guidance on how to group restoration areas into sites profiles on TerraMatch and how to name those sites consistently.

How to Group Restoration Areas into Sites

How to Name Sites

How to group Restoration Areas into Sites

On TerraMatch, you will create a site profile to represent each general location where you are doing restoration work. This is a critical part of TerraFund's approach to Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV). You can read all about TerraFund MRV and review the newly-published MRV Guidebook here.

All projects must create at least one site profile, except for enterprise projects that are not doing any on the-ground restoration work. 

Site profiles could be grouped by villages/communities, wards, counties, or other administrative units, based on the scale of your project. We recommend you begin your siting process by:

• Identifying how many distinct geographies you will be working in. 
  • Example 1: if you have been assigned two forest blocks to restore in two different gazetted forests, you should create two sites, one for each forest.
  • Example 2: if you are distributing seedlings to smallholder farmers to use for agroforestry in three separate wards, you should create three sites, one for each ward.
• Clustering restoration areas by proximity.
  • All restoration areas within the same geography, and that are likely to source trees from the same nursery, should be grouped together into a site
• Limiting your project to 5 or fewer site profiles on TerraMatch.
  • You will report on each TerraMatch site profile every 6 months, so to limit your reporting work, you can use the guidelines above to group your on-the-ground restoration areas into sites on TerraMatch.

You may add new site profiles at any point during the two-year active restoration phase of your project, for example if restoration expands beyond the areas initially represented in your site profiles on TerraMatch. Any time you identify the need for a new site, you must create a new site profile on TerraMatch so that you can report on that site in the next reporting cycle.

How to Name Sites

You should choose a naming convention for your sites that is concise, descriptive, and consistent. 

• Generally, we recommend you name your sites by combining your organization name + name of area (village, ward, or gazette forest)

  A few specific cases:

  1. If you have a concentrated and a distributed site in a similar geographic area, you can use a modifier to distinguish them, based on the type of restoration.

  Example:

• ERN Kamembe Agroforestry

• ERN Kamembe Community Forest Restoration

1. If you are in a consortium with other projects, name your sites using both the implementing partner organization name + name of area

   Example: GBM Kanunga village

To learn more about how to set up your site profiles on TerraMatch, please review this article: How to Create a Site Profile on TerraMatch