The three questions at the heart of land management

Three simple questions that should sit at the centre of our efforts in land management, if we are serious about shifting the dial from destroying nature to helping it flourish. So why are they rarely centre stage in agro-ecology, regeneration, rewilding and conservation? Why are they not on the lips of every farmer, land manager, estate owner, land investor, agri-lender, food brand, nature-focused NGO and government?

It is not as if we lack the science. Ernst Haeckel coined the word "ecology" back in 1866. The first genuinely systematic measurement approach was developed by Richard Kolkwitz and Maximilian Marsson in Germany in 1908 and 1909; their Saprobien system classified river stretches by the organisms that tolerated different levels of organic pollution. And it has been thirty years since "ecosystem health" crystallised as an explicit interdisciplinary field in the 1990s.

The reason these questions are not central is, I think, straightforward. Measurement systems that provide meaningful information for management decisions need to focus on the flows happening in an ecosystem, not the snapshot state of it. A soil health sample, a carbon measurement, a biodiversity count: all of these are snapshots. They are fragments of a greater whole, which is the overall health of the ecosystem. It is a bit like knowing how many metres a team passed the ball in a single match. Interesting. But did they win? How have they done across the season?

What a farmer or land manager really needs, in order to make the best decisions for their land, is insight informed by which ecosystem processes are working well and which are not. There are four ecosystem processes operating whenever and wherever life exists on earth: water, energy, minerals and living relationships. So we have four questions to answer. How well is the water cycle working? How effectively is sunlight being converted into energy? To what degree are minerals and nutrients being made available to living things? And how well are the symbiotic relationships between living things working?

These questions matter because they are the link between, on the one hand, the principles and applied experience now available for managing ecosystem health, and on the other, the on-the-ground reality of making decisions about this field, in this place, in this season. Without the context-specific detail, applying general principles is at best a hit-and-miss affair, and at worst fails to produce the improvements needed.

Such assessments have been expensive, and therefore not done at any significant scale. They required trained experts to walk the land and produce detailed reports. A week of a field ecologist's time for a single medium-sized farm would not be unusual for a comprehensive assessment. And there are not enough trained experts to cover even 1 per cent of the land, even if cost were no barrier. In short, this vital information is unavailable.

This is why we created EcoIntel, the Land Health System. Put simply, we can assess the health of land, diagnose why it is performing the way it is, and provide guidance for the land manager on what to do next, at a fraction of the cost of even a single site visit by an expert.

The system is live and already being used in the UK and Italy. It can look back to 2018, so we can see how things have changed and whether past practices have been effective. We can tell whether the results reflect good management or good weather. We can see what is happening season by season. Land health is scored on an easily understandable Beaufort scale, from 1 (Collapsed) to 9 (Flourishing), with all land measured against what is possible in its own eco-region, field by field, woodland by woodland, season by season, year by year. The results are available as map layers and as diagnostic assessments online, updated continually as the seasons unfold.

The system generates reports tailored to different stakeholders. For farmers and land managers, the focus might be straightforward farming productivity, or making management decisions for land health to increase carbon sequestration and other ecosystem services for which they are being paid. For companies with land-based supply chains, the focus might be disclosure to comply with regulatory frameworks such as the ESRS or TNFD. For brands and farmers alike, it might be to show customers how they are making a difference to nature.

The game changers are speed and cost. Speed: a few minutes uploading farm and field data, and within hours the system is live, with everything available at the touch of a keyboard. Cost: an annual subscription that equates to less than a single day of a professional adviser's time.

EcoIntel would not have been possible to build even two years ago. It combines ecological intelligence with artificial intelligence, EI x AI, to reveal patterns that previously could not be seen. Using satellite data, it assesses every 10 metre by 10 metre block of land, rather than relying on representative samples. The system does not replace walking the land, or the expert knowledge of a farmer or their adviser. But it is like having an expert do that all year round, and having done so since 2018.

So the next time you think about a farm, a field, an estate or a nature reserve, you might want to ask the three questions that are vital if we are going to leave our landscapes in better health for future generations. How healthy is this land? Why is it the way it is? What should be done next? And if you are the person charged with stewarding that land, or influencing those who do, those questions are ones that can now be answered.