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. It launched publicly in 2021 and was named a finalist for the 2021 Earthshot Prize.

Restor is a free, map-based platform where restoration and conservation practitioners register project sites and access satellite imagery — capable of resolving individual trees — alongside ecological data layers on climate, soil, historical vegetation and species distribution, contributed and reviewed by a network of more than 200 science collaborators. Its stated purpose is to let funders, researchers and the public see, compare and monitor change at restoration sites over time, acting as connective and transparency infrastructure for the restoration movement rather than as a certification body.

By December 2021, reporting from the Global Landscapes Forum found the platform held data on nearly 76,000 registered sites, with Latin America and the Caribbean the most represented region; independent tallies since have put registered projects at 70,000-90,000-plus. Restor does not itself certify carbon credits or verify ecological outcomes at those sites — it supplies monitoring data and connections that individual projects and third-party standards can draw on.

A caveat worth noting: 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.

Read the full analysis: https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2021/06/a-social-network-for-global-ecosystem-restoration.html