Impact · Methodology
How every number is earned.
Trust in restoration numbers is earned by publishing the boring parts: baselines, thresholds, error bars and the categories of claim we refuse to make. This page defines every metric on the impact dashboard.
First principles
Four rules before any figure.
Report the action and the outcome separately
Seeding is effort. Canopy is outcome. Credits are proof. Most greenwashing lives in conflating the three — so we never combine them.
Publish error bars, always
Every canopy map carries its error bound. Every credit carries its discount rate. A number without its uncertainty is marketing, not measurement.
Baseline honestly
Sites are baselined with at least a full year of surveys before seeding, so “returning species” mean something.
Decline what you can’t verify
Tidewright leaves pipeline credits unclaimed every season. Permanence over decades is the price of a credit good enough to sell.
Definitions
Metric by metric.
Hectares seeded
A hectare is counted as seeded when Holdfast lines have been laid across it, confirmed by vessel GPS tracks and post-lay dive inspection. It is an action metric, not an outcome metric — and it is always reported alongside verified canopy so the difference stays visible.
Seeding is reported per austral/boreal season. Sites seeded but later lost entirely to storms or heat remain in the seeded total for the season they were laid, and are noted as losses in site records.
Verified canopy
Verified canopy is the headline metric we care about: kelp surface canopy confirmed by satellite imagery (multispectral, clear-sky passes), supplemented by drone photogrammetry for sub-pixel detail and diver quadrats for ground truth.
A site counts toward verified canopy only after two consecutive survey windows detect canopy at or above reference-density thresholds for the region. Canopy that appears and vanishes within one window is reported as transient and never credited.
Blue-carbon credits issued
Credits are issued only after verification, and only for carbon Tidewright can trace: restored-forest biomass exported to deep sediment, measured with tagged-wrack studies and sediment cores, then discounted heavily for uncertainty.
Every credit passes eight additionality and permanence tests — including a decadal monitoring commitment funded at issue. The pipeline figure (118,000 tCO₂e) is what could be credited if verification succeeds; the issued figure is all we stand behind today.
Species returning
The count of species that restoration monitoring has recorded on a restored reef where they were absent in baseline surveys: fish, invertebrates, algae and cryptic taxa from diver quadrats, drop cameras and eDNA transects.
It is deliberately conservative — presence is not abundance, and we do not count opportunistic sightings without survey confirmation.
Harvest tonnes
Wet tonnes harvested from restoration-adjacent farms operated under the Tidewright Harvest standard. These farms are never counted as restored habitat; the revenue funds restoration, the farming itself is reported separately.
Funding mix
Shares of program revenue across four streams: Tidewright Harvest product sales; blue-carbon and biodiversity credit sales; council and government delivery contracts; and philanthropic grants, which we aim to shrink toward zero.
Go deeper
The library is open.
The science hub hosts Tidewright’s working papers and open datasets; the blue-carbon explainers unpack MRV, additionality and permanence in plain language; and every project page shows the site-level record behind the program totals.
Tidewright is a fictional company created as a design and content demonstration. Methods described here reflect real-world good practice in blue-carbon MRV; the framework documents and figures are illustrative.