Session summary
This GeoField 2026 practice session examines how Earth observation can support operational monitoring and impact evaluation for land restoration, emergency response, and climate resilience. The presentations cover restoration monitoring, flood exposure assessment, and evaluation designs for climate resilience initiatives in Benin and Bolivia.
Moderator: Ana Paula de la O Campos
Monitor EO Tool: Assessing Land Restoration at Scale
Lorenzo de Simone and Vivian Ondieki present Monitor EO, a tool for assessing ecological trends in nature-based carbon offsetting and restoration projects. Using a global database of project sites, the tool compares restoration areas with matched controls and tracks indicators such as greenness, moisture, land surface temperature, evapotranspiration, productivity, water-use efficiency, connectivity, and spectral diversity. The presentation emphasizes that restoration monitoring should be multi-indicator, context-specific, and long enough to capture ecological change.
EVE: Global Open-Access Platform for Flood Monitoring and Exposure Assessment
Andrea Amparore presents FAO’s work on flood monitoring through the Data in Emergencies program. The presentation introduces efforts to distinguish expected seasonal surface water from anomalous flood events using a temporal atlas of surface-water occurrence. By comparing observed water against historical seasonal baselines, the approach can support humanitarian response, anticipatory action, recovery planning, and future impact evaluation.
Benin: Ouémé Basin Climate Resilience Initiative
Luis Becerra Valbuena presents an evaluation design for a Green Climate Fund project in Benin’s Ouémé River basin. The project includes water infrastructure, land restoration, tree planting, and farmer field schools. The evaluation team is exploring geospatial strategies such as spatial regression discontinuity, difference-in-discontinuities, machine-learning-supported counterfactual selection, and plot-level data collection linked to satellite-derived measures of flooding, soil moisture, vegetation, tree cover, and agricultural outcomes.
Bolivia: Upscaling Ecosystem-Based Climate Resilience
Silvio Daidone presents an evaluation design for a Green Climate Fund project in Bolivia’s macro-valleys region. The project aims to strengthen climate resilience through training, climate-smart agriculture, agroforestry, irrigation technologies, and micro-watershed restoration. The proposed evaluation combines randomized treatment assignment with Earth observation, plot polygon collection, vegetation and moisture indicators, evapotranspiration-based water productivity measures, and longer-term monitoring of restoration outcomes.
Together, the session reinforces that Earth observation is powerful for monitoring ecological and agricultural change, but it does not replace careful evaluation design. Restoration impacts may take years to emerge, floods must be interpreted against seasonal baselines, and climate resilience outcomes often require linked socioeconomic, project-location, and geospatial data collected over longer time horizons.