Monitoring Change
Robust monitoring is essential to demonstrate the impact of projects and provide evidence of what does and doesn’t work to practitioners, programme managers, policy makers and the wider public.
In order to understand and measure the benefits of restoring natural processes and landscapes, we need to record the changes that occur, and attribute them to the actions taken. To guide this, the ELP has developed a bespoke rigorous monitoring framework, which is being used by all ELP Implementation Projects. Through the monitoring framework, each project is collecting data on indicators in three themes, describing the ecological, ecosystem service, and societal changes caused by landscape restoration. Each project selects at least nine indicators to monitor across the three indicator themes.
The chosen indicators need to be informative about progress towards each project’s outcomes within the five-year period covered by the ELP grants. In most cases it will take much longer than this for a landscape to reach its target state, so we encourage projects to continue to monitor a smaller set of indicators in the longer term. To see the range of indicators being used across current ELP projects, please see our full list of project indicators.