CL6-2026-BIODIV-01-two-stage | Terrestrial ecosystem monitoring design — Pacific Rim organic farms

Greenback is designing a monitoring protocol for biodiversity and freshwater ecosystem health on organic farms in Aotearoa New Zealand, intended to underpin a verified ecosystem services payment system. The protocol incorporates eDNA metabarcoding for species richness, macroinvertebrate community indices for freshwater health, GPS-verified native vegetation extent, and satellite land cover change detection. This protocol has not yet been field-validated — establishing the scientific rigour and practical feasibility of this approach at farm scale is a core research problem we need to solve before any registry or payment system can be built.

We hold a signed letter of intent from an anchor offtaker — a leading certified organic food company operating across Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia — confirming that once the monitoring methodology is validated and credits can be issued, a buyer is ready. This makes field validation of the monitoring protocol a commercially consequential research activity, not an academic exercise.

We are seeking consortium partners with ecological monitoring, restoration science, eDNA methodology, or living lab design expertise who are working on terrestrial and freshwater ecosystem observation in agricultural landscapes. Our organic farm network offers access to producers with documented management histories, genuine motivation to participate, and land that spans a range of soil types, elevation gradients, and freshwater catchment contexts in a Southern Hemisphere temperate bioregion not currently represented in European living lab networks.