About Terraso

Tech Matters joined the 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People initiative (1000L) consortium in 2019 as one of the core partners. The goal of the 1000L initiative is to accelerate landscape efforts to sustain and restore ecosystems through a process called Integrated Landscape Management (ILM). Tech Matters began development of Terraso as part of the 1000L initiative to better support ILM and engage local community leaders representing landowners, agribusiness, smallholder farmers, pastoralists, indigenous people, local government, and investors. Terraso provides the software and data tools local actors need to bring their stakeholders together, overcome conflicting agendas, find common ground in a sustainable vision for their ecosystem and foster community determination to make critical changes.

Tech Matters is a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit organization with a mission to bring the benefits of technology to all of humanity. We work hand-in-hand with social change visionaries to build tech solutions needed for real systems change, to create large-scale, positive impact. Tech Matters is staffed by tech experts with a passion for social justice and a commitment to further positive social change.

Our Values

Terraso is co-designed with landscape leaders around the world, and built from the ground up with their values in mind.

Terraso respects that landscape data belongs to landscape members, not outsiders.

Terraso is a durable digital good – organized and managed to last.

Terraso supports community needs: mobile first, localized, and functional offline.

Terraso is open source, now and forever.

Our Process

Two women look at a phone screen next to an open laptop. — A Terraso team member works with an ANEI member during a user feedback session in Valledupar, Colombia.

Listen to co-design partners

The Terraso digital platform is a central component of the 1000 Landscapes (1000L) initiative. The Terraso team spent over a year interviewing local landscape leaders around the world in a co-design process, and heard loud and clear how better information, tools, and financing could enable the 1000L vision of locally-led change.

During our discovery process, we heard five themes from our co-design partners that represented the main needs of local leaders and conservation actors throughout the world:

tools that work with their current technology and capabilities
the ability to gather, organize, and control the data about their landscape
maps that are accurate and useful
ways to communicate with their community and the world
funding

One woman and two men sit around a table looking at laptop screens. — Terraso team members work with ALDEA team members during a usability test session in Quito, Ecuador.

Co-design

The co-design process is integral to our design and development process. The Terraso team works closely with co-design partners and user-testers to ensure the tools and resources included in Terraso continue to accurately address the important needs of landscape and conservation actors. Users of Terraso now have access to software supporting data collection, data storage, data sharing, data mapping and storytelling. Capacity strengthening tools are in active development and funding resources in the first stages of planning. Terraso tools are designed to work in areas of limited bandwidth and perform well on older devices. Sign up for the Terraso newsletter to learn more about available features as they are released.

Our Partners

Co-design partners

The Terraso toolkit would not be possible without the close collaboration of our co-design partners who ground our efforts in the realities they face and provide feedback for the solutions we explore and create. We have been lucky to work with organizations representing six out of the seven continents.

Twelve people standing in front of a thatched roof building. Four of the people are wearing traditional indigenous Colombian clothing. — Sacred Sierra landscape co-design partners

LandPKS

LandPKS is a suite of tools created by the USDA with funding from USAID. LandPKS tools allow people to learn about their land and capture site-specific data to better understand its potential for plant growth. The LandPKS mobile app is free to download for Android and iOS devices. Users can access and download their data from the Data Portal.

The Terraso team is working to create the next generation of the LandPKS tool suite, which will provide users with greater understanding about their soil, what they can do with it, and insight into what others have done with soil similar to theirs.

Hands pushing soil around a newly planted tree. — Planting in a landscape.