How Planted Trees Are Verified: Satellite, GPS, Drones and Field Data

Q: Why is survival rate more important than trees planted?

Planting figures are easy to publish while survival determines whether a forest actually results. Carbon estimates depend on surviving trees rather than planted ones.

Q: How often should a planting site be monitored?

Most intensively in the first three years when establishment is decided, then periodically to confirm the forest is developing and has not been disturbed.

27 Apr 2024 in Corporate planting · Updated 8 Oct 2026

How Planted Trees Are Verified: Satellite, GPS, Drones and Field Data

Field team verifying planted trees with GPS equipment

A planted tree is only as credible as the evidence behind it — and credible reforestation uses four layers of verification: satellite imagery to plan and watch the site, handheld GPS to record site boundaries and planting positions, drone mapping to measure growth from above, and field inventory plots to count what actually survived. This is what separates a traceable planting programme from a headline number, and it is the part most buyers never think to ask about.

The four layers, and what each one answers

Satellite imagery — what was here before, and what is here now? Establishes the pre-planting baseline and tracks canopy change over years.
Handheld GPS — where exactly is this site, and where exactly is this tree? Produces the coordinates that tie a planting record to a real site.
Drone mapping — how is it developing between satellite passes? Centimetre-scale detail on growth, gaps and failures.
Field inventory — how many are actually alive? The only layer that answers the survival question honestly, because it involves someone walking the site.

No single layer is sufficient. Satellite alone cannot tell you a sapling died; a field count alone cannot prove the site was not already forested. Used together they make a planting claim checkable by someone who was not there.

Satellite: the baseline nobody can retrofit

Before planting begins, satellite imagery establishes what the land was: bare, degraded, previously forested, or — critically — already an intact ecosystem that should not be planted at all. That baseline matters because it is the one piece of evidence that cannot be reconstructed after the fact. A project that cannot show you its pre-intervention imagery is asking you to take the most important claim on trust.

Afterwards, the same imagery tracks canopy development, detects disturbance such as fire or clearing, and gives an independent check on what field reports say. It is the layer that makes a claim auditable years later, by anyone, without a site visit.

Handheld GPS: from "somewhere in Kenya" to a coordinate

On the ground, field teams use handheld GPS units to demarcate the site boundary and record planting positions. This is unglamorous work and it is where traceability is actually created. It produces two things a buyer can use:

A verifiable site polygon — the boundary within which the planting happened, checkable against the satellite baseline.
Planting-site coordinates — the points that locate the planting on the ground, turning an abstraction into a place on a map.

The difference between "we planted 10,000 trees in East Africa" and a set of coordinates inside a mapped polygon is the difference between a marketing claim and a record. Evertreen shows the location, photos and updates of each project, and companies in custom partnerships can request the coordinates of their planting sites.

Drone mapping: the detail satellites miss

Drones fill the resolution gap. Flown over a site, they capture overlapping high-resolution photographs that are stitched into an orthomosaic — a single, geometrically corrected aerial map where distances and areas can be measured accurately rather than estimated.

That gives project teams several things satellites cannot provide at useful resolution: individual crown identification on young plantings, precise measurement of gaps where establishment failed, evidence of encroachment or grazing damage, and repeatable flight paths so the same area can be compared season to season. Where satellite imagery tells you a site is greening, an orthomosaic tells you which parts are not, and by how much — which is what actually drives replanting decisions.

Field inventory: the layer that decides the number

Everything above is remote sensing, and remote sensing cannot count a dead sapling under a canopy. That is what forest inventory is for.

Field teams record what was planted, then return to measure what survived using semi-random circle plots: sampling points distributed across the site, within which every tree is counted, identified and assessed. Because the plots are sampled rather than exhaustive, a whole site can be characterised without walking every metre of it, and because their placement is semi-random rather than chosen, the result cannot be flattered by surveying only the healthy patches.

From those plots come the numbers that matter: survival rate, species composition, growth rates and health indicators. Survival is the metric that separates serious programmes from promotional ones — planting figures are trivially easy to publish, while survival requires somebody to go back and look.

Why this matters for your reporting

Verification is not a technical footnote; it is what makes a corporate claim defensible. A stakeholder, an auditor or a journalist asking "how do you know?" should receive coordinates, imagery, a survival figure and a methodology — not a press release.

It also disciplines the carbon maths. Absorption estimates depend on how many trees are alive, of what species, at what age — which is why Evertreen publishes its assumptions in how we estimate tree CO₂ and applies conservative, species-specific values that already allow for mortality. An impressive per-tree figure attached to an unverified survival rate is arithmetic built on sand.

The wider point applies well beyond planting: plot-level geolocation is becoming the default expectation for environmental claims, from supply chains under the EU deforestation regulation to carbon credits. "Prove it, with coordinates" is the direction of travel.

What to ask any planting partner

Can you show me the pre-planting satellite baseline for this site?
Can you give me the coordinates of the planting site?
What is the measured survival rate, and how was it sampled?
Who does the field monitoring, how often, and are they paid to maintain the site?
What happens when a section fails — is it replanted, and is that recorded?
Is the CO₂ methodology published, or just the headline number?

A partner who can answer all six without hesitating is rarer than it should be. You can see how Evertreen answers them across its planting projects, or start with the trees available to plant from £1.5 each — each one followed online through the project location, photos and updates.

Frequently asked questions

How are planted trees verified? Through four combined layers: satellite imagery for baseline and change, handheld GPS for boundaries and planting-site coordinates, drone mapping for high-resolution growth measurement, and field inventory plots for measured survival.

What is an orthomosaic map? A single geometrically corrected aerial image stitched from many overlapping drone photographs, accurate enough that distances and areas can be measured directly from it.

What are forest inventory circle plots? Sampling points distributed semi-randomly across a site, within which every tree is counted and assessed, so survival and growth can be estimated for the whole site without surveying all of it.

Why is survival rate more important than trees planted? Because planting figures are easy to publish and survival is what determines whether a forest actually results. Carbon estimates depend on surviving trees, not planted ones.

Can satellites confirm individual trees? Not reliably for young plantings. Satellites establish baselines and track canopy change; individual-tree confirmation comes from GPS records, drone imagery and field visits.

How often should a site be monitored? Most intensively in the first three years, when establishment is decided, then periodically to confirm the forest is developing and has not been disturbed.

What evidence should a company receive? Coordinates, project and species detail, imagery or video from the site, a measured survival figure, and a published carbon methodology.

29 Sep 2026

What Is ESG? A Simple Guide for Small Businesses

ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance — a simple framework for how a company manages its impact and risks across those three areas. For a small business it is less about glossy reports and more about answering practical questions from customers, tenders, and staff: how your work affects the planet, how you treat the people around you, and how honestly you run the numbers. You do not need a sustainability department to make a start — just a clear head and a willingness to measure before you claim anything. The three pillars of ESG, in plain English Environmental. Your footprint — energy use, business travel, waste, and the CO₂ your operations produce. Social. How you treat employees, customers, suppliers, and the wider community around you. Governance. How decisions get made: ethics, data protection, fair pay, and honest record-keeping. Why the three sit together. Combined, they signal whether a business is resilient and trustworthy, not merely profitable this quarter. What it is not. ESG is not a marketing badge; treated that way it quickly becomes a liability rather than an asset. Why small businesses are suddenly being asked about ESG Even if you never publish a report, ESG questions arrive through the back door. Larger customers increasingly pass their own supply-chain rules down to smaller suppliers, public and corporate tenders now award points for environmental credentials, and employees and investors want to know what you actually stand for. Almost all of these conversations begin with a single number: your carbon footprint. You can produce a first estimate in minutes with a free CO₂ calculator, which turns a vague expectation into a figure you can put on paper and improve over time. There is a regulatory undercurrent too. Large companies in the EU now face structured sustainability reporting, and the practical effect for an SME is that their questionnaires get longer and more specific. You are rarely regulated directly; you are regulated through your customers. What you will actually be asked for Supplier questionnaires vary in length but converge on the same handful of items. Prepare these once and you can answer most of them: Your measured carbon footprint, with the reporting year and the boundary stated. Whether you have a reduction target, and what it covers. What you offset, under which standard, with evidence of retirement. Basic people policies — pay, health and safety, anti-discrimination, modern slavery statement where applicable. Governance basics — data protection, anti-bribery, who is accountable for all of the above. A single well-maintained page covering those five items answers most questionnaires and takes an afternoon rather than a consulting engagement. Practical first steps: start with the environmental The E is the most actionable pillar for a small team, so begin there. Measure your footprint, cut what you genuinely can — switch to greener suppliers, reduce travel, waste less — and then offset only the remainder rather than pretending it is already zero. Offsetting is where transparency matters most: Evertreen lets you fund real tree planting from £1.5 per tree, and for compliance-grade reporting you can request certified Verra and Gold Standard credits. The order is the point — measure, reduce, then offset — because buying credits before you have cut anything is exactly what regulators now single out. The method is in how to calculate your business carbon footprint. Don't neglect S and G — they are cheaper than you think Small businesses often assume the social and governance pillars require formal programmes. Mostly they require writing down what you already do. Fair pay practices, a clear complaints route, supplier payment terms you actually honour, a data protection policy that matches reality, and a named person accountable for decisions — that is a credible S and G position for a company of ten people. What damages a small business is not the absence of a glossy policy; it is a policy that says something the company visibly does not do. How visible tree planting supports the social side Environmental action doubles as social proof when it is visible and honest. Every tree Evertreen funds belongs to a named project whose location, photos and updates are published, so you can show customers where their impact sits instead of asking them to trust a logo — useful both for credible reporting and for engaging your own community. Some businesses turn this into branded corporate gifting, planting a tree for each client win or employee milestone. One caution worth repeating: never let planting become a substitute for reduction. Claiming to be "carbon neutral" while your emissions keep climbing is greenwashing, and it does more reputational damage than staying quiet. Note too that from 27 September 2026 the EU bans marketing a product to consumers as carbon neutral on the basis of offsetting. Keep the story modest, specific, and backed by numbers you can defend — see are carbon offsets greenwashing? Frequently asked questions Does a small business really need to worry about ESG? If you sell to larger companies, bid for tenders, or want to attract good staff and investors, yes — you will be asked. Starting small with a measured carbon footprint is usually enough to stay in the conversation. Where should a small business start with ESG? Start with the environmental pillar because it is the most measurable. Calculate your CO₂ footprint, reduce what you can, and offset the rest transparently before worrying about the social and governance pillars. Is planting trees enough to make my business sustainable? 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14 Sep 2026

Eco-Friendly Employee Gifts That Actually Mean Something

The best eco-friendly employee gift is one that creates zero waste, feels genuinely personal, and still supports the sustainability goals your company already reports on – and a real, named tree does all three at once. Where branded mugs, tote bags, and gift cards are quickly forgotten or thrown away, a planted tree gives each colleague something lasting with their name attached, while turning a routine thank-you into a small but measurable environmental contribution. For an internal audience, that combination of low cost, no logistics, and real meaning is difficult for any physical gift to match – and it keeps working long after the moment has passed. Why a planted tree makes a better staff gift No clutter. There is nothing to wrap, ship home, or eventually throw out – the gift lives in the ground, not on a desk. Personal by default. Each employee receives a certificate in their own name, so a company-wide gesture still feels individual rather than a mass send. Scales to any headcount. Gifting five people or five thousand takes the same effort, with a cost from £1.5 per tree. On-brand for ESG. If sustainability is part of how you present the company, the gift reinforces that message instead of contradicting it. Measurable. Every tree belongs to a real, located project and has an estimated CO₂ contribution you can fold into your reporting. Inclusive. A tree carries no size, taste, or dietary constraints, so the same gift genuinely suits everyone on the team. How it compares with the usual options Branded merchandise. Cheap per unit, but a large share is discarded, and staff can read logo-covered items as advertising rather than thanks. Gift cards. Genuinely useful and genuinely impersonal — and a meaningful proportion go unredeemed. Hampers and alcohol. Well received by some, awkward for others, and a compliance headache in regulated industries. Charity donation in their name. Closest in spirit, but usually invisible — there is nothing to look at afterwards. A tree in a named project, with its location, photos and updates, is the version you can actually see. The honest caveat: for some people, nothing replaces a physical object. For a small group of key recipients, pairing a certificate with something tangible covers both instincts. Moments worth marking with a tree A tree suits the moments that deserve more than a generic reward. Use it as a welcome gift during onboarding, so a new hire's first day already says something about the company's values; to mark work anniversaries, promotions, and project milestones; as an end-of-year holiday thank-you to the whole team; or as a wellbeing and all-hands recognition reward. Because you can gift a single tree or thousands at once, the same gesture works for one new starter on their first morning and for an entire company at the close of the year – without redesigning the process, managing stock, or watching the budget balloon each time headcount grows. Getting the details right Give more than one tree. Five to ten per person reads as a real gesture; a single symbolic tree per head can feel like a rounding error. Name every certificate. The difference between "we planted 500 trees" and 500 named certificates is the difference between a CSR line and a gift. Send it from a person, not the company. A line from a manager beats a templated all-staff email every time. Avoid the December pile-up if you want it noticed — a mid-year thank-you lands far better. Show the forest at the all-hands. A map of the company forest growing year on year does more for engagement than the original email did. How it works across a whole team Behind each gift is a real tree in a named project – with the project's location, photos and updates, not a vague pledge – and every employee receives their own personalised gift certificate, all collected into a single company forest you can show off at your next all-hands or on a careers page. For larger programmes, our API and Shopify integration let you trigger a tree automatically the moment someone is onboarded or reaches an anniversary, so the admin work stays close to zero as you scale, and our corporate gifting case studies show how other teams have run exactly this. Because the projects and their locations are documented, the impact can feed ESG and engagement reporting honestly – no rounded-up numbers or offset math, just the trees that were actually planted in your team's name. One framing note for the reporting side: gifted trees are a contribution, not a carbon claim. Keep them separate from any neutrality statement — the distinction is explained in tree planting vs carbon offsets. The wider corporate approach is in corporate tree gifts for clients and employees. Frequently asked questions How much does it cost to gift a tree to employees? Trees start from £1.5 each, and the price per tree stays the same whether you gift a handful or several thousand. There are no separate per-recipient fees on top, so a 200-person team simply costs 200 trees and the total scales predictably with your headcount. What does each employee actually receive? Each person gets a personalised certificate in their name, linked to the project where their tree is planted, with its location, photos and updates, rather than a generic voucher. They can follow that certificate to see the project's area on the map. Can we gift trees to a large team at once? Yes. Bulk gifting is built for any headcount, and you can automate it through the API or Shopify so trees are sent at onboarding or on each work anniversary, with every tree gathered into one company forest. How many trees should we give per employee? More than one. Five to ten per person reads as a genuine gesture, and the cost difference at that scale is small compared with most physical gifts. Do employees actually like receiving trees? Response improves sharply when the certificate is named, the message is personal and the location is included. A generic company-wide announcement gets a much cooler reception. Can we use this for remote and international teams? Yes — that is one of its main advantages. There is no shipping, customs or address problem, so everyone receives the same gift on the same day. Can gifted trees count towards our carbon reporting? Treat them as a contribution rather than an offset claim. 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5 Sep 2026

What Is the Carbon Footprint of a Website?

A typical web page emits roughly 0.5–5 g CO₂ per view, so a website's carbon footprint is simply that per-view figure multiplied by your traffic — a site serving a million page views a year lands at ≈ 0.5–5 tonnes of CO₂. The exact number swings with page weight, how and where the site is hosted, and the devices your visitors use, so treat any single result as an order-of-magnitude estimate rather than a precise measurement. Where a website's emissions come from Data centres. The servers that store and deliver your pages draw electricity around the clock, plus extra energy to keep the hardware cool. Network transfer. Every image, script, font and video crosses routers, cables and mobile networks that all burn power in transit. User devices. Phones, tablets and laptops spend their own energy downloading, rendering and displaying each page you send them. Traffic volume. A tiny per-view figure multiplied by millions of visits is what quietly turns grams into tonnes over a year. How to estimate your site's footprint To size your own footprint, multiply a realistic per-view figure by your annual page views — but first work out where your pages sit in that 0.5–5 g band. The biggest driver is page weight: heavy hero images, autoplaying video and uncached assets can push a single page well past 5 g, while a lean, well-cached page stays under 0.5 g. Hosting matters almost as much, since a server on a renewable-powered grid emits far less than a "dirty-grid" data centre running on fossil fuels. Rather than guess, drop your numbers into a free tool such as Evertreen's CO₂ calculator to get a defensible annual estimate before you change anything. A worked example Take a mid-sized business site with 500,000 page views a year: At a lean 0.5 g per view, that is about 0.25 tonnes a year — roughly a short-haul return flight. At a heavy 4 g per view, it is about 2 tonnes — roughly a long-haul return flight per year, every year. The instructive part is the ratio: the same traffic produces an eightfold difference purely from how the pages were built. Very few carbon reduction levers in any business are that cheap to pull. What actually drives page weight In practice the culprits are consistent, and they are rarely the things developers worry about: Video. An autoplaying background video can outweigh the entire rest of the page by an order of magnitude. It is almost always the single biggest win. Uncompressed images. Serving a 3000px hero image to a phone is the most common waste on the web. Modern formats and correct sizing usually cut image weight by 60–80%. Third-party scripts. Tag managers, chat widgets, A/B tools and analytics stack up quietly, and each one is downloaded and executed on every device. Web fonts. Four weights of two families is a surprisingly heavy default. Two weights is usually plenty. No caching. Returning visitors re-downloading assets they already have is pure waste. A note on "green hosting" claims Most green-hosting claims rest on renewable energy certificates rather than a physically different power supply — the provider buys certificates matching its consumption. That is a legitimate market-based accounting method, and it is genuinely better than nothing, but it is worth understanding for what it is. Stronger signals are on-site generation, long-term power purchase agreements and published carbon intensity per region. The mechanism is explained in RECs vs carbon offsets. Either way, reducing what you send beats accounting for what you sent. How to cut a website's carbon footprint Once you know the rough figure, the fastest wins come from shrinking what you send. Compress and lazy-load images, strip out unused scripts and fonts, minify your code and cache aggressively so returning visitors re-download as little as possible. Choosing a host that runs on renewable energy cuts the data-centre share at a stroke, and a good CDN shortens the distance your data has to travel. In practice these steps can halve a page's footprint while also making it load faster, which tends to lift conversions and search rankings at the same time — a rare case where the greener option is also the more profitable one. Offset the remainder with traceable trees You will rarely reach zero on efficiency alone, so the honest final step is to offset the emissions you cannot yet design out. Evertreen lets you fund real reforestation with traceable trees from £1.5 each, and you can plant trees as a one-off or on a recurring basis, with each project's location shown on a map so you can show visitors where their impact lands. For businesses, our API and Shopify integration build offsetting straight into a site or checkout, so you can neutralise emissions automatically per order or per visit rather than by hand. When you need audit-ready proof for ESG or customer reporting, you can also request certified Verra & Gold Standard carbon credits on top. Keep the claim proportionate: a website's footprint is usually a small line in a company's total, so treat it as a well-executed detail rather than the centrepiece of your climate story. The full inventory is in how to calculate your business carbon footprint. Frequently asked questions How much CO₂ does a website produce? A single page view is usually 0.5–5 g CO₂, so a site serving a million page views a year sits at roughly 0.5–5 tonnes of CO₂. Page weight and the cleanliness of your hosting decide where in that range you land. How can I reduce my website's carbon footprint? Shrink page weight, compress and lazy-load images, cut unused code, cache assets and move to a host powered by renewable energy. These steps lower emissions and load times together, and you can offset whatever remains. Can planting trees offset a website's emissions? Yes. After you have estimated your annual footprint and reduced what you can, funding traceable trees or certified carbon credits lets you balance the CO₂ you cannot yet remove. What is the single biggest change I can make? Remove or replace autoplaying video, then right-size images. Together they account for most of the weight on a typical marketing site. Does dark mode reduce emissions? Marginally, and only on OLED screens. It is a nice touch, not a strategy — page weight matters far more. Is a static site greener than a dynamic one? Usually, because it caches better and does less work per request. The difference is smaller than the difference between a light page and a heavy one. Should we advertise our site as carbon neutral? Be careful. 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