Towards a digital workflow for forest restoration

I missed the “From Seeds to Success: Digital Tools for Planning and Managing Forest Restoration” webinar a few weeks ago, jointly organized by the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, the Millennium Seed Bank at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Forest Restoration Research Unit (FORRU), Chiang Mai University. Too busy moving to another continent. But fortunately there are now a handy summary and even a recording online.

To remind everyone about what the webinar was about:

The programme featured live demonstrations of five innovative digital tools, developed to support restoration planning, seed sourcing and project management, followed by an interactive discussion, during which participants explored their applications, strengths and future development.

With these five tools, therefore, we have the beginnings of a digital seed-to-restoration pipeline. Which is very exciting to me.

Let’s go through it step by step, and tool by tool.

1. Define the restoration objective and choose species: Diversity for Restoration (D4R)

Picture yourself looking at a site you want to restore. This tool answers the question: What should we plant here?

D4R is the front-end decision-support tool. It combines information on:

restoration objectives

environmental conditions

species distributions

functional traits

seed zones

future climate scenarios

to recommend suitable species and seed sources.

2. Find the seed: SeedPOD

Then we need to know: Where can we actually obtain suitable seed?

Once D4R has identified desirable species and potentially appropriate provenances, SeedPOD steps up as the seed-sourcing layer, providing information from different organizations worldwide on the storage, availability, and germination of their seed collections. It is scheduled for launch in September 2026.

3. Decide how to handle and store the seed: Wyse–Dickie Seed Storage-Behaviour Predictor

But you won’t necessarily be able to get such information on all the seeds you might need. So how should we handle those seeds?

This tool predicts whether seeds are likely to be:

orthodox — tolerant of drying and suitable for conventional storage

recalcitrant — sensitive to drying and therefore requiring different handling

using species characteristics, taxonomy and environmental variables. That means you can work out how to process and store them.

4. Germinate and produce seedlings: Germination Experiment Assistant (GEA)

Having the seeds is great, but how do we turn them into viable seedlings?

Where there is little or no published germination information, you will need to generate it yourself. GEA uses experimental data and predictive modelling to produce species-specific germination protocols, including practical procedures for nurseries.

5. Track the material through the restoration operation: MyFarmTrees

Finally, once the work has started, you’ll need to monitor how it’s going: What happened to each seed lot, seedling and planting?

MyFarmTrees is the operational backbone of the five tools. It tracks restoration activities from seed collection to nursery production to field establishment using QR-coded seed lots and mobile technology. This gives you traceability. It also creates the possibility of connecting restoration activities to monitoring and ultimately payment-for-ecosystem-services systems and the like.

Is anything missing?

Having these five tools is great, but they don’t quite constitute the entire restoration workflow. They cover the biological-material pipeline extremely well: selection → sourcing → handling → propagation → deployment → monitoring. But the webinar participants did identify restoration approach selection, as well as planning collecting programmes, as gaps in the current digital toolkit. Along with, inevitably, seamless integration, or at least interoperability, of all the different tools.

So there should maybe be an initial stage to the above sequence:

0. Assess the site and restoration strategy

Because before unleashing D4R, you do need to know a bunch of stuff, for example:

What is the state of the site?

Is active planting actually necessary?

What natural regeneration is occurring?

What ecosystem are you trying to recover?

What functions are missing?

What species are already present?

What are the local threats?

What restoration approach is appropriate?

And there should also maybe be a stage parallel to what I labelled 2. Find the seed above. Call it…:

2b. Collect the seed

Because if SeedPOD says suitable seed is available, all well and good. But if it isn’t, it would be nice to have a “seed collection planner” to generate a collecting programme for you, factoring in the distribution, ecology, mating system, and phenology of the target species, the accessibility of potential collecting sites, the budget available, you get the idea.

So maybe eventually the complete architecture of the system will be something along these lines:

Site assessment: What needs restoring? Gap

Restoration design: What restoration approach is appropriate? Gap

Species & provenance selection: What should we plant? D4R

Seed sourcing: Where can we obtain it? SeedPOD/Gap (collecting)

Seed handling/storage: How should we handle it? Wyse–Dickie

Germination/propagation: How do we produce seedlings? GEA

Traceability & deployment: Where did every seed/seedling go, and what happened to them? MyFarmTrees

Monitoring: Did restoration succeed? Gap/MyFarmTrees

Interested in seeing where all this goes, as I am? Start by registering for the re-run of the webinar on 30 September.

Source: https://agro.biodiver.se/2026/08/towards-a-digital-workflow-for-forest-restoration/