Ground truth is trusted, repeated human observation of the same land over time. It is a person returning to a place they know, looking again, and keeping what they saw. Ecosystem function is the foundation that food, water, health and climate stand on, and it is failing. We cannot restore what we cannot see, and we cannot prove what we do not keep.
Ecological data is now abundant, from satellites, sensors, models and AI. What is scarce is ground truth. Much of the ground truth that does exist is being lost. Records of land under holistic management sit in scattered spreadsheets, on personal laptops and in project folders, and when a programme ends, its evidence often ends with it. Years of careful observation, the very evidence that land can heal, quietly disappear.
Models and AI are only as good as the ground truth they are checked against, and the demand for trusted scientific evidence of land recovery keeps rising. Hubs on several continents, accredited monitors and educators, a shared language of the four ecosystem processes, and long relationships with the people who make decisions on land are already in place. Whatever happens to any one programme, the records those people have gathered, and will gather, should not be lost.
This page is a draft proposal from WeCology. It has not been agreed by the Savory Network, and it is still open for input. The proposal is that those records be kept as a ground-truth seeking repository: the observations that show, over time, what holistic management and science-backed regenerative land management actually do to land. Its purpose is evidence and knowledge for ecological literacy, not just storage.
The repository records observations, not verdicts: what was seen, where and when. It does not certify outcomes, which lets the evidence outlive any one organisation or its politics. The records are held as a commons, in trust for the land managers who made them and for everyone learning to restore land. Farmers and land managers own the data about their land and choose whether to contribute it, anonymously if they wish. The land manager's consent governs any wider use.
The records are organised by ecoregion, so that like is compared with like. A public platform would present the evidence the way ecology is organised. ecoregion.net is one example of such a platform. On this site, ground truth is what EIA learns from and is checked against, so it asks better questions and never hands down verdicts. The more ground truth it learns from, the better the questions it can help people ask. Those records feed each ecoregion's EIA knowledge status, shown as Empty or Building, and the Living EOV records. Every contribution keeps who or what it came from, and when.
Any field tool that captures observations to a shared, published standard can contribute. The standard is time-stamped and geo-stamped, able to work offline, and has no verdicts built in. GeoDataTrack is one tool that can contribute. The standard is tool-neutral, and a public list of the tools that meet it would be kept.
Ground truth pairs with ecological literacy training. Training without a repository trains people on data nobody can trust. Data without training means intelligence disappears into a database. Together, calibrated observers produce records worth keeping and sharing with the world, and the repository makes their work count for the long term. Behind all of it is a deeper aim: bringing the evidence together so that people and land come back into relationship, with the land itself staying the final authority.