Acción Andina, Transforming Forest Restoration Data
Published on: September 15, 2025
Back in 2024 
Florent Kaiser, co-founder of Acción Andina, was telling me they needed a better system to manage data for their reforestation efforts. A place for anyone in the organization to see their impact. Vetted numbers. Centralized. No more distracting the operations team with the same question over and over. They wanted to see everything on a map and share it easily with funders and the public. Most of all, they wanted to own their data and have their own system. No more scrambling to produce yearly reports on other platforms.
Acción Andina is a movement that restores high Andean forests in South America. The initiative addresses severe deforestation and glacier loss by partnering with local communities to plant native , which help capture water. This effort has already resulted in millions of trees being planted, providing jobs and environmental education, with the goal of restoring one million hectares of ecosystems.
We started by getting to know who’s running the operations on the ground. Global Forest Generation is in charge of bringing funding, operational systems, communications support, and overall strategic guidance. Acción Andina and
ECOAN handle the operations together with 16 partners across 6 countries in the Andes. It’s like an orchestra of reforestation — funders, operators, and local partners all working together along the mountain range.
We’ve learnt that to properly support an organization, we need to have a main point of contact, and ideally this person is in charge of operations. This person feels it when data is disorganized and they’re always looking to learn more from it. 
Adrián Torres is our link. I often tell our key person: “Data is our clay, just send it over, it doesn’t matter how big, messy, or complex it is.” Together with Adrian we contemplated thousands of carefully recorded field entries living in spreadsheets, each lovingly maintained but hard to analyze at scale.
Acción Andina’s operations are impressive! 16 organizations with some projects starting in 2018, showed 120 seasons worth of data across the 23 projects. The data represented nurseries, volunteer and community participations, planting events, monitoring plots, tree quantities, species, and more. Not only we needed to combine all the datasets; we also had to link them to every piece of on-the-ground geospatial data the team had gathered over the years.
One of the goals of the effort was to be able to trust any data shared internally and externally. To achieve that, data had to be vetted. That meant verifying it, talking to partners, and making sure it was standardized. Given the sheer volume, we decided to start with the most important key questions:
How many trees were planted?
How many hectares restored?
Which species planted?
When did the planting occur?
Exactly where in the map?
The monitoring team, together with the 16 partner organizations dove deep on those layers to make sure they were correct and standardized across all projects. Huge props to Adrián and 
Stephanie Arellano for managing the process, and 
Víctor Sánchez for the fantastic job on the GIS side.
This data could be represented as a bunch of polygons on a map with properties. But in order for the data to be useful we had to contextualize it.
After listening carefully to how Acción Andina thinks, we defined the data hierarchy: Country → Organization → Landscape → Project → Season → Site. Linking on the ground data to that structured would allow the team to see the key KPIs from a continental level, down to a single planting site — no more hunting through spreadsheet files.
At a technical level, we created custom data schemas for each one of these entities; (Project, Reforestation, Nursery, Community, etc…). Each representing the key attributes they cared about. One of the motivations behind Restoration Scope is to always adapt our systems to the partner’s needs. We don’t impose a data structure, but rather listen, and bend our structure to theirs. This means less effort on their end and more time spent doing the real job: planting trees.
The other main goal of the big data validation effort was to power a public portal. This would be shared with funders and the public.
The big breakthrough here is that now, the operations team’s effort to track their own progress are synchronized with Acción Andina’s portal. No more manual reporting to 3rd party sources. The data comes straight from the source.
Over the following seasons we will be layering more key metrics like community‑participation stats, drone imagery, monitoring report data, and non‑planting interventions like fencing and watershed work.
Acción Andina’s multi-partner structure called for a customized platform that adapts to the way they collect and report data, rather than software that forced them into a one-size-fits-all solution. Restoration Scope worked with Acción Andina and its partners to create a platform that increased internal and external data transparency—and integrated with their existing operations to make reporting easy rather than onerous, and to illuminate operational decisions and outcomes.
Many thanks to the whole Acción Andina team: Stephanie Arellano for coordinating everyone, Adrián Torres and Víctor Sánchez for working with partners and vetting the Data, and for sharing the portal with the world, and 
Erin Lebbin, Florent, and Tino for stewarding this beautiful project.
Learn more about what an amazing project Acción Andina is: