Most conservation giving asks you to trust an aggregate. You donate, and somewhere a number goes up — hectares, tonnes of carbon, trees "equivalent". You never learn which tree, or whether it is still standing. For a donor, that is an act of faith. For the communities doing the protecting in Namibia's Zambezi Region, it is worse: the value they create is invisible, so it is hard to fund the local conservancy stewardship that keeps trees safe from clearing and fire.
We wanted to see what the opposite would look like — a single, named, real tree you can follow from space for years. So we built one with the Porini Foundation, a Swiss conservation non-profit.
One tree, a permanent ID, an honest log
The prototype detects individual trees from satellite imagery, gives each a permanent ID, and lets you adopt one, name it, and watch it change. Every tree carries an append-only observation log, and every datapoint discloses its source, its confidence and the model version behind it. Nothing is asserted; everything is traceable back to where it came from.
Health comes from a real satellite pipeline — canopy-height data to place trees, Sentinel-2 for vegetation vitality, and sub-metre very-high-resolution imagery for the "hero" crown outlines. Seen across seasons, the signal is dramatic: the same canopy reads lush after the rains and stressed in the dry months.
Stewardship, not carbon credits
Adopt a tree, name it, choose a yearly contribution and you get an instant certificate and a living page that updates over time. The money is framed as stewardship — Payments for Ecosystem Services, survival-linked and paid to the people protecting the landscape. It is explicitly not a carbon credit: no offset is sold, no tonne is claimed on your behalf.
One honest caveat, stated plainly: this is a Phase-0 prototype running on simulated data, shaped 1:1 to the real planned schema and data lineage. The counters you see are seed values for the demo, not verified field results — swapping in live measurements is an ingestion-layer change only, with the interface untouched.
The live demo is open-source at zambesi.operal.tech. Adopt a tree, and the promise is simple: you will always be able to see exactly which one — and exactly where the evidence came from.