Case Study: WIRRED
Case Study: WIRRED
About the project
About the project
WIRRED is a Barbados-based nonprofit research hub, land reserve, consultancy, and community program center dedicated to the study and implementation of climate smart regenerative agroforestry practices. WIRRED works locally and globally to build resilient economies, ecosystems, and communities by creating disruptive design systems that increase biodiversity, enhance ecosystem services, and improve the well-being of individuals and communities.
Ecological contex
For the last 50 years, Walkers Quarry provided sand to the island of Barbados. Sand quarries create air and water pollution, extensive land degradation, loss of natural habitats, and natural resource depletion. In 2011, quarry management decided to transform extraction areas into Walkers Reserve: an ecologically-thriving, forested ecosystem.
Following permaculture design and management principles like rotational grazing and soil stabilization (among many others), the quarry now provides habitat to threatened and endangered migratory birds, aids leatherback turtle conservation, sequesters carbon, helps fight climate change, grows perennial food systems, and strengthens the local economy to ensure a brighter future for the community.
Challenges
Regen Network approach
Carbon sequestration
Remote sensing verification
Using a combination of satellite imagery from Sentinel-2 and Planet Scope, Regen Network measured several ecosystem health indicators on Walkers Reserve, including land conversion, landscape diversity, carbon sequestration, and land regeneration index.
Qualitative:
- Ability to classify and track changes in land cover types including water, forest, agroforestry, herbaceous, vegetated dunes and bare soil.
- Ability to quantify the changes in carbon (tons/ha/year) for each land management unit.
- Used NDVI to create a trendline and conceptual framework for analyzing and measuring the land regeneration.
Quantitative: >90% accuracy in classification and tracking, 7% YoY improvement.
Improving the verification methodology accuracy, incorporating more ground truth data from 2020.
Project-based funding via Regen Registry + Regen Ledger
Project-based funding via Regen Registry + Regen Ledger
Creating a project on Regen Registry and storing monitoring data as immutable records on Regen Ledger which provides an important layer of transparency and accountability to funders.
Project page on Regen Registry targeted to go live in Q4. Regen Ledger integration to be added in subsequent phase.
Creating a dedicated carbon offset methodology for the quarry restoration. Launching the Project Page on Regen Registry and getting conservation funds to WIRRED.
Conclusion
With promising results thus far, our pilot project with WIRRED is showing the potential Regen Network partnerships have to monitor, track, verify, and usefully store data.
Conclusion
With promising results thus far, our pilot project with WIRRED is showing the potential Regen Network partnerships have to monitor, track, verify, and usefully store data.
