Changes at "GreenBarriers: Regenerative ecosystems to prevent soil erosion"
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-Title-GreenBarriers: Regenerative ecosystems to prevent soil erosion- Summary of the challenge
- Ecosystem restoration in eroded areas is becoming increasingly urgent, with increasing danger of fast floods to rural population and loosing valuable fertile soils across Europe. But ecosystem restoration remains unaffordable at scale, grow plants in degraded areas is expensive and difficult. Access to degraded public land from municipalities is time consuming for NGO's or almost imposible, most of the times reforestation contracts are made with big reforestation companies that are only interested in large areas. The challenge is to address the structural barriers in ecosystem restoration faced by practitioners and grassroots initiatives—such as access to land, water, tools, labor, and resources—while proposing decentralized, effective, cooperative and innovative restoration, developing affordable eco-technological and digital solutions to democratize and scale land restoration. The aim is to connect collaborative and regenerative models to seed based restoration technologies for enabling effective and affordable erosion control that reconnect communities and degraded landscapes.
- Detailed description
- This challenge emerges from over a decade of grassroots and academic experimentation in affordable, open-source solutions for ecosystem restoration, with a special focus in a paradigm change: from planting trees, to seed-based ecosystem restoration. The challenge highlights a key structural barrier to land regeneration: the current model of restoration is economically unsustainable, socially exclusive, and ecologically inefficient. Most public and private restoration efforts rely on planting nursery-grown seedlings. While politically visible, this approach has inner constraints: * Drains public funds and limits the scale of interventions. * Seedling production is limited to a reduced number of species. * Complicated logistics and transport. * Requires soil preparation by heavy machinery. * Huge labor for planting in remote areas. * At least two rounds of summer irrigation to ensure survival. In dryland contexts, where water is scarce and soils are degraded, these methods are prohibitively expensive, centralized, and disconnected from the people and communities most affected by soil degradation. They tend to favor large private or state-owned corporations like TRAGSA (in Spain), with high operational costs and limited flexibility. While excluding smaller organizations, cooperatives, and community-led initiatives from participating in ecological restoration efforts, struggling to access land, public funds, or state of the art tools. These smaller actors are often more agile, inclusive, and ecologically grounded, but they lack infrastructure, labor force , and political leverage to work at scale. The result is a centralized model that fails to match the scale of land degradation across Europe. But there is an alternative: seed-based restoration and Low Tech Erosion Control: * Drastically more affordable than using seedlings. * Not dependent on irrigation. * Easier to scale across large, remote, or rugged areas. * More inclusive, allowing civil society groups, cooperatives, and municipalities to participate. For example, the Stipa tenacissima, a native grass used traditionally for basketry, which plays a crucial role in erosion control and soil stabilization in semi-arid zones. Unlike seedlings, directly sowing mulching pellets of Stipa seeds requires no watering and enables the recovery of soil structure, microclimate, and organic content. We are addressing this challenge from the ground up, through ten years of standing work at Dronecoria, an open-source platform for research in ecosystem restoration. Our team has conducted extensive seed-based research, combining scientific protocols with different technologies to increase survival success and impact in the soil in degraded areas. Including developing seed coating and pelleting techniques to reduce predation and improve seed survival, designing and testing manual and mechanized tools for seed sowing, or conducted field experiments on seed predation and germination rates in drylands. Our research has been developed in close collaboration with academic institutions, most notably the University of Granada, where we carried out experiments in seed enhancement technologies and seed predation scientific experiments. We’ve also worked internationally, adapting our methods to diverse ecological and social contexts: * In Rosario, Argentina, in a social innovation gathering we transferred our knowledge to agroecological collectives, to improve their sowing practices by learning how to improve their own seeds. * In Brazil, we collaborated with the Universidade Federal de Rondonópolis, participating in a cross-disciplinary workshop on open technologies for restoration, building a drone for native species sowing. * In Ecuador we offer consultancy services to the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Ecuador, for their project A million of trees for ecuador. These experiences demonstrate that restoration is not only a technical challenge, it is political and cultural. Land access, governance, and participation are just as important as ecological methods. Therefore, we propose a holistic, multi-actor solution built around low-cost, low-tech restoration tools and commons-based governance. The proposal to address this challenge could include: Transnational Land Bank for Restoration A digital and legal infrastructure co-designed involving municipalities, cooperatives, scientists, and local residents that enables public and private landowners to register degraded land and make it available for ecosystem restoration by cooperatives, NGOs, youth brigades, universities, or agroecological movements. This platform could include: * Open stewardship agreements * Monitoring templates * Land access matchmaking * Participatory Governance and Policy Design * Draft inclusive public procurement models Seed-Based Restoration Toolkit An open-source kit that makes seed-based methods accessible to non-experts, including: * Seed sourcing and storage. * Seed enhancement technologies guide. * Seed pelleting and coating recipes. * Low-cost sowing tools * Community training protocols. * Guidelines for long-term, nature-based restoration LTEC – Low Tech Erosion Control Techniques Integrating LTEC (Low Tech Erosion Control) practices—such as brush check dams, rock lines, contour barriers, or swales—into restoration protocols. These are simple, scalable methods that: * Slow water runoff * Trap sediment * Support seed retention and root establishment * Require minimal tools and materials. By combining seeds and LTEC, we create a synergistic approach that regenerates both vegetation and hydrology, even in severely degraded environments. Pilot Projects and scientific research Prototypes in several test areas in Southern Europe, combining: * Seed-based restoration * LTEC structures * Community labor and co-management * Monitoring protocols and open data publication These pilots will serve as proof of concept for local governments, EU programs, and community organizations.
- Which SoilTribes priority area(s) does your challenge address?
- Soil Democracy
- Territorial Justice
- Commons Stewardship
- Regenerative Transitions
- How does your challenge respond to the selected SoilTribes priority area(s)?
- I strongly believe that the challenge addresses all four SoilTribes priority areas: Soil Democracy: With a land bank to help public and private owners make degraded land accessible for community-led restoration, enables participatory land governance and allows more actors to work in restoration. Territorial Justice: By apply low-cost techniques—like seed-based restoration and LTEC— more organizations can participate in restoration, and not only big organizations, allowing the regeneration of degraded rural areas, even marginal lands, often excluded from traditional restoration efforts, benefiting the rural people of the restoration. Commons Stewardship: With integrated science, pilot projects with erosion control and biodiversity results, this collective participation in the soil promotes shared, low-barrier restoration practices rooted in collective care. Regenerative Transitions: By shifting from costly plant-based methods to seed-based restoration and LTEC, we enable a regenerative transition, unlocking large-scale, low-cost, and community-driven regeneration.
- Which EU Soil Mission goal(s) does your challenge contribute to?
- Prevent erosion
- Reduce soil pollution / enhance restoration
- Conserve soil organic carbon
- Reduce desertification
- Enhance soil biodiversity
- Challenge typology
- Cracks (pressure points/tactical disruption)
- Expected outputs / actions
- Capacity-building (training, guides, mentorship)
- Participatory processes
- Prototyping or technical testing
- Who is involved or affected by the challenge?
- We collaborate with reforestation NGO's and farmers around Granada province, and share our methodologies to other NGO's across Spain. We would like to collaborate with a network of local farmers, Alvelal that manages more than 100.000 hectares in Andalucia, and the network of agroecology villages in Spain, to participate in the concession of land for ecological restoration.
- Where is your challenge located?
- Our research laboratory and Living Lab is in Alpujarra, Granada.
- Which SoilTribes pillar(s) are you connected to?
- Academia, Education & Research
- Business: Social Economy & Cooperative Sector
- Is this a joint submission?
- No
- What public policies or institutional frameworks does your challenge engage with or seek to change?
- The EU Nature Restoration Law, formally known as the Nature Restoration Regulation, is a landmark piece of legislation aimed at restoring degraded ecosystems across the European Union. It sets binding targets for restoring at least 20% of the EU's land and sea areas by 2030, with the goal of restoring all degraded ecosystems by 2050. With the current costs of ecosystem restoration, varying around 3000 euros per hectare, these goals are virtually unaffordable. By investing in affordable solutions like seed-based ecosystem restoration, and open platforms for land access, like land bank, communities could achieve these goals with a fraction of their cost.
- How do you imagine the Bootcamp will benefit your initiative — and others?
- I hope to meet collaborators to co-create the whole project, specially the social side, and legal aspects of land reclamation, write a variety of ecosystem restoration projects templates to use by different actors across europe, meet early adopters that could be interested in implement seed based restoration projects, restoration practitioners with projects ready to use our solutions, technicians to co-create affordable restoration technology, scientists to help the design and make experiments in different locations and publish the results. Make together a community platform to pave the way of land reclamation and ecosystem restoration, with accesible practices to reach broader audience.
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