Testing the Nature Positive Initiative State of Nature Metrics for Landscape Collaboration

Challenge

Nature Positive Initiative’s State of Nature (SoN) Metrics 

At present, there is no common, holistic approach to measure nature’s decline or recovery. To support this, the Nature Positive Initiative (NPI) is building consensus on a core set of universal State of Nature Metrics.  

Improving the state of nature at the landscape scale requires collaboration between a range of stakeholders and across a variety of land use types and management approaches.  

A barrier to landscape-level collaboration on nature-based projects can be the lack of a common framework for identifying, measuring and reporting biodiversity outcomes. A lack of clarity on the best biodiversity metrics that can be applied consistently across different actors, but are ecologically meaningful is a further challenge. Developing an understanding of the baseline condition of nature and facilitating progress toward a common goal is particularly relevant when seeking to implement collaboration across multiple properties and land tenures.  

South Coast Western Australia pilot  

In May 2025, New Forests was selected to participate in the Nature Positive Initiative’s pilot of their draft (SoN) Metrics. The draft metrics were based around tracking changes to: 

• ecosystem extent 
• ecosystem condition 
• species (extinction risk and population abundance). 

New Forests, South Coast NRM (SCNRM), PF Olsen (PFO), BirdLife Australia and NatureHelm came together to deliver a NPI SoN Metrics pilot. The pilot aimed to understand whether the metrics support: 

• Joint decision-making to improve nature outcomes at the site, ecoregion, and landscape levels. 
• SCNRM’s Natural Capital Program(Opens in a new tab/window).  
• Future investment into the region by connecting to global initiatives.  
• Communication with regional stakeholders. 

This was the only pilot of its kind. It was valuable for understanding the applicability of the NPI SoN Metrics at the landscape scale. 

Strategy and actions

The piloting organisations used NatureHelm’s geospatial data and analytics platform, to calculate the SoN Metrics based on the NPI proposed methodology. To supplement the geospatial data aggregated in the platform, the organisations also provided shapefiles and ground-based data, including bird surveys. 

How the metrics were calculated  

The team calculated the metrics at the low granularity to understand whether this lower-cost approach delivered meaningful outputs. While in some instances, the team calculated the metrics at a higher granularity, they primarily relied on satellite data of land cover to calculate the metrics to test scalability. 

The metrics were calculated for five diverse sites: 

• 56,000 hectares of plantation forestry and conservation area managed by PFO. 
• Three priority sites for the SCNRM, ranging in size from 500,000 hectares to 2.5 million hectares and encompassing a range of land uses.  
• The South Coast region, which covers 8.6 million hectares of a mixed-use landscape. 

Stakeholder engagement 

Throughout the pilot, there was engagement with a range of stakeholders to test the applicability of the SoN Metrics to the region.  This included: 

• Discussions with research organisations throughout the pilot to inform our approach. 
• Hosting a workshop in September 2025 to share preliminary results with stakeholders, including Aboriginal Corporations, catchment managers, research organisations, government representatives, and industry groups. 
• Hosting a workshop in December 2025 with the same stakeholders to share the results and discuss the limitations and potential use cases. 

Engaging with stakeholders was important to:   

• Understand whether the metrics would be useful to their existing work and future strategies. 
• Support the identification of local data sources that may be beneficial for integration with the global satellite datasets.  
• Identify key gaps and challenges for using the approach applied during the pilot. 

Outcomes and lessons learned

Meaningful collaboration  

The pilot was a collaborative effort between the participating organisations. It was successfully completed due to each organisation’s willingness to engage in the process and provide expert advice on the metric methodologies and the data sources, as well as the ground-based data. 

Key challenges  

Some of the primary challenges encountered during the pilot include: 

• The requirement to set 2020 as the baseline year, when another year may be more relevant to an organisation based on the point of acquisition and more accurately reflect their nature impacts. 
• The inability of satellite data to differentiate between plantation forestry and other forest types. The consortium was able to interpret these results by applying the known land use type.  
• How to account for sustainable forest management’s cycles of harvesting, planting, and growth so that changes within planted areas are not misinterpreted.  
• The course resolution of global datasets meant that small-scale native vegetation patches and restoration projects are not captured as improvements over time.  
• Global datasets on extinction risk are inadequate and observed changes in extinction risk may reflect broader landscape or regional trends rather than project-level impacts. 
• Global datasets more generally can provide an initial scoping exercise to understand  basic ecological attributes. However, due to coarse resolution, local spatial layers and ecological datasets, or, in their absence, ground-based ecological surveys, will be required to gather more precise data for informing the SoN Metrics.  
• Establishing reference sites to understand condition is challenging at a landscape scale. The team addressed this by using the catchment as the reference for larger sites, but this does not allow for detailed results across the site. 
• Flexibility to select the methodology used when calculating condition introduces risks of inconsistent interpretation across regions and/or sectors. 
• Species metrics require additional work, as change measurements cannot be calculated with current public data sources.  

Providing further insights on the state of nature 

At this stage of the project, the benefits are primarily related to knowledge building and supplementary insights on the state of nature for the piloting organisations and regional stakeholders. The organisations involved are interested in exploring how the NPI metrics could be enhanced in the future to provide more granular assessments of nature positive outcomes on the ground. 

Road ahead

The South Coast NPI SoN Metrics pilot was one of the several preliminary steps to improve natural capital investment, monitoring and reporting in the region. The use of satellite-based data to calculate the metrics was lower cost and effort than ground truthing. However, the pilot unveiled the importance of integrating local knowledge and ground-based data to understand changes to the state of nature. While ground-based data may not be feasible across an entire site due to scale and associated costs, at a minimum it can be used in the most material locations and/or to help train satellite-based models. 

The NPI metrics represent a pivotal step in standardising how organisations measure and report on ecosystem extent, condition, and species. This is crucial for understanding where capital is required to maintain and improve the state of nature. This is an important basis to support ongoing funding and support for conservation and restoration.   

New Forests, SCNRM, PFO, BirdLife Australia and NatureHelm will use the pilot outcomes as part of their respective, broader strategies around contributing to nature positive outcomes. For example: 

• New Forests may use the pilot results to create an aggregated view of whether its portfolio of assets is enhancing or eroding natural capital.  
• SCNRM is seeking subsequent funding to ground-truth the applicability of other multi-dimensional satellite data to measure landscape scale extent and condition more accurately.  
• PFO is piloting the use of satellite images supplemented with high resolution drone captured images and field assessments to build a baseline assessment of vegetation structure and condition. 
• BirdLife Australia is exploring how existing, long-term bird data held by the organisation may be used to develop benchmarks or enhanced metrics to track change.  
• NatureHelm is translating the outcomes and feedback from the pilot project into automated workflows and advanced data analytics that can support and streamline broader adoption of the metrics by agribusinesses and investors across Australia and globally.