Questions, plainly answered.

What is Landseed?

Landseed is a US-based public benefit corporation building the measurement layer for nature-based markets. It mints Earth Credits — a standardized commodity representing verified ecological condition on protected land — and operates the registry that records and tracks them.

Landseed is to ecosystem credits what Verra is to carbon credits: a verifier and registry, not a trader.

What are Earth Credits?

An Earth Credit is a standardized unit representing one acre-year of verified ecological condition. Unlike carbon credits, which measure a single ecosystem service, Earth Credits capture the full ecological value of a landscape across six scientific dimensions: physical, chemical, compositional, structural, functional, and landscape.

Credits are purchased and permanently retired for ESG, biodiversity, and sustainability commitments — once retired, a credit cannot be reused.

How is Landseed different from carbon credits?

Carbon credits measure one ecosystem service: greenhouse gas removal or avoidance. Earth Credits measure all six dimensions of ecological condition, capturing the full value of a landscape — biodiversity, water cycling, soil function, ecosystem structure — rather than reducing nature to one carbon-equivalent number.

Earth Credits complement carbon credits; they don't replace them.

Does Landseed trade or sell Earth Credits?

No. Landseed verifies ecological condition, mints Earth Credits, and operates the registry — but does not trade, broker, price, or hold inventory of credits.

Once minted, Earth Credits transfer between parties on independent markets that operate outside Landseed. The verifier is not also a trader, by design.

How does Landseed measure ecological condition?

Landseed measures ecological condition with continuous, in-situ instruments rather than periodic project audits. The Earth Pulse Node, an AI-enabled sensor cluster, captures five kinds of signal — optical, acoustic, soil, water, and weather — and combines them into a single Ecological Condition Index, a 0–1 score aligned with the UN ecosystem accounting framework.

Weakness in any one dimension is not masked by strength in another.

What is the Earth Pulse Node?

The Earth Pulse Node is Landseed's field-deployed sensor cluster — the hardware layer of the measurement infrastructure. It is solar-powered, runs unattended for years, and processes its data on-device, so it works in remote sites with no continuous connectivity.

The node combines five kinds of signal — optical, acoustic, soil, water, and weather — into a single continuous ecological signal that feeds the credit and data layers above it.

How does Landseed's AI work?

Landseed's AI runs on-device at the edge, not in the cloud. Detection models are trained in-house on proprietary datasets developed across decades of conservation work, and the system fuses all five sensing modalities into a single ecological signal.

Running at the edge is what makes monitoring viable in remote sites that have no continuous satellite or cellular link.

What is the methodology based on?

The Earth Credit Methodology is built on the UN System of Environmental-Economic Accounting — Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA), the international standard for ecosystem accounting, adopted by the UN Statistical Commission in 2021.

It aligns with the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, GEO BON Essential Biodiversity Variables, and the TNFD and SBTN frameworks that institutional investors and corporate disclosure programs are converging on.

Who governs the methodology?

The methodology is governed by an independent Scientific Committee that sits outside the business. The committee includes named scientists from major conservation and research institutions, with public comment periods and an annual review cycle.

The full roster is on the team page.

What is a Nature Rights Deed?

A Nature Rights Deed is a recorded legal instrument that captures specific ecosystem service rights on a parcel of protected land. Unlike a conservation easement — which restricts what a landowner can do — a Nature Rights Deed creates a positive, transferable property right tied to verified ecological condition.

The deed is recorded with the local property registrar and binds successors who take the land, providing the legal anchor against which Earth Credits mint.

How does a Nature Rights Deed differ from a conservation easement?

A conservation easement is a negative instrument: it restricts what a landowner may do. A Nature Rights Deed is a positive instrument: it conveys the ecosystem-service and credit-generation rights of the parcel.

The two are designed to coexist — where a parcel is already under a conservation easement, the easement does the settled legal work of protecting the land, and the Nature Rights Deed layers the measurable credit right on top.

What about indigenous land and Free, Prior, and Informed Consent?

Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) is a precondition to deployment on any land where indigenous or community sovereignty may be involved — not an afterthought. The standard is set out in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and ILO Convention 169: consent obtained free of coercion, in advance, on the basis of full disclosure, through the community's own representative institutions.

The Nature Rights Deed has an indigenous-governance variant designed so ecological rights are community-held or community-benefiting rather than extracted — value flows with the landholder and community, not away from them.

How is Landseed different from companies like Sylvera, BeZero, or Pachama?

Those companies operate on the rating or estimation layer above credits that already exist. Landseed operates on the measurement layer beneath them. Sylvera and BeZero are ratings agencies — they score the quality of credits that others issue, in roughly the role Moody's and S&P play for debt. Pachama models carbon and land outcomes from satellite and statistical inference. None of them own in-situ measurement hardware or mint credits against a recorded property right.

The relationship is potentially complementary rather than adversarial: in a mature market, ratings agencies could rate Earth Credits.

What is nature equity?

Nature equity is a tradeable financial instrument representing rights to the ecosystem services produced by a piece of land. It is created when a landowner records a Nature Rights Deed alongside their property deed, then assigns ecosystem service rights — measured and verified using the Ecological Condition Index — to a separate, transferable entity.

Earth Credits are the issued, standardized representation of nature equity.

What are Earth Signals?

Earth Signals is Landseed's real-time structured ecological data product — the third layer of the commercial model, alongside the Earth Pulse Node hardware and Earth Credits. It aggregates outputs from the same monitoring infrastructure that underlies Earth Credit verification — satellite imagery, in-situ sensor networks, biological surveys — into queryable streams licensed across insurance, capital markets, corporate disclosure, conservation research, and risk modeling.