Carbon baseline in La Muskitia: design the fieldwork before you measure

A carbon project is judged by its baseline: the picture of the forest before the project begins. If that picture is taken badly, everything measured afterwards inherits the error. So in the La Muskitia Landscape, our work started before any measuring: we designed the field assessment.

With whom

The assessment was designed with six Indigenous Territorial Councils. The territory is theirs, and so is the knowledge of how to get in, when work is possible and which places matter.

What we designed

• Sampling: where the plots go, how many and why, so they represent the landscape and not just the easy-to-reach sites.
• Biomass and soil protocols: how each tree and each sample is measured, with the same steps for every crew.
• Quality control (QA/QC): field and desk checks that catch errors before they reach the analysis.
• Inputs for the PDD and MRV: the data comes out ready for the project design document and for monitoring, reporting and verification.

Why design matters

A crew can measure precisely and still produce data that doesn't hold up, if the plots don't represent the landscape or each team measures differently. Design is the part of the work that doesn't show in the final report, but it decides whether a verifier accepts it.

Measuring well starts with deciding, before going out, what to measure, where, and how it will be checked.

Written byRuben AlmendaresIT