Restor — ETH Zurich's Open Satellite Platform Mapping Ecosystem Restoration Worldwide

Restor was developed by the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich, building on the lab's 2019 global-restoration-potential research, with Google.org providing a $1.2 million grant from 2020 to develop and scale the platform using Google Earth Engine and Google Cloud infrastructure.

Restor is a free, map-based platform where restoration and conservation practitioners register project sites and access satellite imagery alongside ecological data layers on climate, soil, historical vegetation and species distribution, contributed and reviewed by a network of more than 200 science collaborators.

By December 2021, the platform held data on nearly 76,000 registered sites, with Latin America and the Caribbean the most represented region; Restor does not itself certify carbon credits or verify ecological outcomes — it supplies monitoring data and connections that individual projects and third-party standards can draw on.

Restor's founding research — the Crowther Lab's estimate that global tree restoration could offset roughly a quarter of atmospheric carbon — was publicly disputed by other climate scientists as significantly overstated; Restor's own value lies in the transparency and monitoring data it aggregates rather than in that contested headline claim.