About SEED

There are two main approaches to measuring biodiversity. There are those which focus on indirect measures by modelling financial data and those which focus on direct geospatial measurements. SEED takes the latter approach, by leveraging geospatial techniques to assess biodiversity at any terrestrial location on the planet. 

SEED is the only methodology to date that accounts for all scales of nature’s complexity at the genetic, species and ecosystem levels. Many tools and methods focus mainly on species with some additional layers of habitat state. Our methodology allows us to assess holistic measures of biodiversity 20-30 years into the past and into the mid-term future.

SEED is standardised and can be applied to any pixel and every ecoregion on the planet without the need for additional ground data. This approach is rapid and cost-effective. Our methodology integrates a wide variety of data and will incorporate new data types as technology and techniques to assess biodiversity evolve.

Nature affects climatic patterns to a very large degree. There would be no habitable climate on Earth without biodiversity. Naturally-occurring levels of biodiversity enhance climate resilience, mitigation and adaptation. For example, soils in areas with high plant diversity sequester more carbon and water than areas with low diversity. SEED includes estimates of the carbon levels at any site and the correlation between carbon and the overall biodiversity in a region.

A reference ecosystem refers to a natural or relatively undisturbed ecosystem that serves as a baseline for comparison when studying and assessing other ecosystems that have been impacted by human activities or natural disturbances.

The relevant comparison we use is not based on what the ecosystem looked like at a specific time in history, but rather on what comparable, minimally-disturbed areas look like today while acknowledging that even relatively “undisturbed” areas may have been transformed significantly over recent times.

Yes. As the SEED Index is based on a relative value for each separate ecoregion, it is comparable across ecoregions. 

While the SEED index itself is comparable, the actions needed to uplift or change the rating will be entirely context-specific. For example, a rating of 0.5 for a property in the United Kingdom and 0.5 for an agroforestry site in Ghana both indicate that these ecosystems contain half the biodiversity of their potential. But the kinds of genetics, species, and ecosystem dynamics are entirely different.

Therefore, our data-driven assessment needs to be contextualized within the goals of any particular land management approach.

For this reason, we do not endorse the use of biodiversity offsets, but are supportive of biodiversity credits that promote equitable nature-positive outcomes. Nature is specific in every region and is inherently non-fungible.

SEED can track both absolute and relative changes in biodiversity over time. This means the shapes in the radar plot for the area of interest will change over time, allowing for an assessment of how the ecological variables shift in absolute terms across the relevant time period.

On the other hand, the SEED Index will measure whether biodiversity is increasing or decreasing in the area of interest at a different rate relative to the reference ecosystem. This means that if climate change causes a deterioration of the reference ecosystem, the SEED index will not change unless the area of interest is deteriorating at a faster or slower rate.

Therefore, the SEED Index tends to reflect changes in biodiversity caused by human interventions based on the general expectation that the area of interest will fluctuate in the same way as the reference ecosystem in the absence of human intervention. That said, this expectation is likely to be violated in many circumstances, for example, where the area of interest has reached an ecological tipping point and, therefore, experiences more severe disturbances to biodiversity than the reference ecosystem due to climate change.