- The first globally applicable Accounting for Nature®-accredited soil microbial assessment method provides businesses with a single ecosystem health metric, informing quick and effective decision-making to boost restoration efforts.
- Through a partnership with Forestry England, the tool has been developed and refined using one of the nation’s largest eDNA datasets.
Global nature monitoring company, NatureMetrics, has today launched its first ecosystem condition metric, bringing together the health and resilience of an environment into a single score to provide businesses with a specific and defensible metric to inform sustainable decision-making.
Powered by ground-truthed eDNA technology, NatureMetrics’ Soil Ecosystem Condition Index (Soil ECI) is the first globally applicable soil microbial assessment with its methodology accredited by Accounting for Nature® – the gold standard environmental accounting framework to catalyse investment in natural capital. The tool combines data from three key biological communities which feeds into one site-level ECI score - scores that aggregate to a single portfolio-level metric for board-ready reporting.
This new index is within NatureMetrics’ growing suite of proprietary science-based ecosystem intelligence indicators, which aim to quantify the resilience and health of a variety of ecosystems across a business’s asset portfolio. The suite aims to enable organisations to measure, compare, and aggregate ecosystem condition across diverse sites, geographies, and ecosystem types.
Healthy soil is a powerful indication of the state of an entire ecosystem. Distilling ecosystem health into a single metric enables easy comparison of site health across entire business portfolios with 95% accuracy, while supporting the understanding of biodiversity risk at the Board level, empowering businesses with a breadth of decision-making from on-ground management through to Board-level financial risk assessment.
To help develop the Index, NatureMetrics partnered with Forestry England, the largest land manager in England, to test its models on one of the nation’s largest eDNA datasets. The partnership analysed 656 soil samples collected from 21 of the nation’s forests which Forestry England looks after, using the Soil ECI to transform raw biological data into actionable health, function and resilience scores that reveal the ecosystem condition of sampled locations. The Index converted what would otherwise be scattered, difficult-to-interpret data points into clear metrics. This enabled Forestry England to easily visualise and interpret results to inform data-driven decision-making, such as planning soil translocations to introduce missing fungi in newly planted woodland areas.
"Restoring fully functioning ecosystems in the 1,500 forests and woodlands in our care depends on healthy soils. But measuring the health of those soils has historically been difficult and slow. The use of eDNA has been a game changer, revealing soil life invisible to the naked eye and impossible to achieve with traditional sampling techniques. Our collaboration with NatureMetrics will enable us to translate vast eDNA outputs into accessible data and insights for our teams working across the nation’s forests. Basing the decisions we make on accurate evidence is essential to support nature’s recovery across the huge landscapes that we manage," said Andrew Stringer, Head of Environment and Nature Recovery at Forestry England.
Data from the nation’s forests have enabled NatureMetrics to strengthen its predictive modelling capability using Google’s state-of-the-art Alpha Earth geospatial AI to identify where interventions are needed and predict the impact of such actions.
"At NatureMetrics, we've always believed that protecting nature requires the same rigour that businesses apply to their finances. Soil ECI represents exactly that; a tool that brings scientific precision and simplicity together. By providing the capabilities to measure soil ecosystem health with 95% accuracy and translate thousands of species interactions into one trusted metric, we're a step closer to comparability and targeted management from individual sites to entire portfolios. The Accounting for Nature accreditation means companies can finally integrate soil health into their balance sheets with confidence. Every business should have the opportunity to leave the ecosystems they touch in better condition than they found them. With new metrics like the Soil ECI, we can set the standard we should all be working toward," said Dimple Patel, CEO at NatureMetrics.
.png)
