se.plan

Online tool to support forest restoration planning

Solution Application

Environmental Mapping

Open Source

Is Forest Restoration Worth It?

se.plan is a free online tool to identify places where the benefits of forest restoration are high relative to costs. A component of the open source software suite Open Foris and part of the SEPAL system, se.plan lets users generate maps and related information on the costs and benefits of restoration efforts on any particular site.

Technical Data

System Capabilities

System Support

Access for Those who Benefit the Most

se.plan focuses on the 139 low- and middle-income countries defined by the World Bank, excluding urban areas and areas where trees don’t naturally grow. The software treats grid cells as independent restoration planning units, with their own potential to provide restoration benefits and entail restoration costs.

Using se.plan

Estimating Restoration Benefits

The se.plan system tracks forest restoration benefits with multiple indicators in four dimensions: biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration, local livelihoods, and wood production. Relative importance of the different dimensions is user-defined to create a restoration value index for each grid cell.

Then, users impose constraints in four categories: biophysical, current cover, forest change, and socioeconomic. This lets users customize results for their particular local context. Further customization is possible by adding additional layers from the Google Earth Engine.

Actionable Results

Output from se.plan includes maps and a dashboard displaying the relevant information in the area of interest defined by the user, classifying specific places by their suitability for forest restoration as measured by the variables selected by the user.

se.plan layers selection