Projects
Connected programs spanning soil health measurement, ecosystem service verification, and the knowledge translation that makes both useful to producers.
Regenerative Alberta Living Lab
Seven ARA and FA partners. 111 producer farms. 340,000 acres under active study. The RA-LL is generating the soil health and soil intelligence data that underlies this organization's broader work.
BMP adoption, soil carbon, and GHG outcomes are measured at the field level across Alberta. FTIR spectroscopy and predictive soil mapping translate that data across landscapes. A comprehensive knowledge transfer program - including field workshops, producer events, and the In Living Cover podcast - brings findings back to producers in a form they can use.
Data is collected by producers on their own operations and returned to them. The goal is that over time, this field-level record becomes the foundation for stewardship verification that connects to financial recognition.
Ecosystem Services Registry and Scaling Grassland Preservation
Phase 1 — Ecosystem Services Registry
Led by The Resilience Institute with FWWF as a delivery and field partner, Phase 1 built the foundational verification infrastructure - a blockchain-based registry developed with Nimon Systems, biodiversity and water credit protocols developed with ACA and MFGA, and the legal and structural framework for credit generation. International connections were established through the ECCO-FARM Mongolia initiative, the Horizon Europe Open Geospatial Carbon Registry, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Phase 2 — Scaling Grassland Preservation
FWWF leads Phase 2, which deploys that registry infrastructure toward a specific and urgent problem: across the prairies, grasslands are under pressure because other land uses offer more stable returns. The ecological value of keeping land in grass is not reflected in what it pays. Without a shift in that economic equation, conversion continues.
Building on the RA-LL dataset and the registry infrastructure, Phase 2 is developing a prairie-wide system linking what happens on the land to measurable outcomes - carbon storage, biodiversity, water function - and to the income those outcomes could generate. Stacked credits, producer champions, and buyer engagement work led by Charlotte Potter (MITACS postdoc) are bringing the market-facing layer into view. The long-term goal is a model that is financially self-sustaining - not dependent on the next grant cycle.
Open Geospatial Carbon Registry
The Food Water Wellness Foundation is proud to be a partner in the Intergenerational Open Geospatial Carbon Registry (OGCR), a Horizon Europe-funded initiative bringing together over 30 research institutes, NGOs, universities, and practitioner organizations from across Europe and beyond. OGCR is building open-source, scientifically validated geospatial tools to transparently measure, verify, and reward land-based carbon sequestration and ecological outcomes -- the same foundational challenge we work on every day with producers across the Canadian prairies.
Our participation reflects a shared conviction that producers and land managers around the world deserve recognition and fair reward for their stewardship, and that the frameworks we build to deliver that -- the registries, the methodologies, the data infrastructure -- must be open, interoperable, and built with producers rather than simply applied to them. OGCR's ambition to scale into an operational system serving all of Europe's 9.1 million agricultural holdings mirrors our own work to build MRV infrastructure that can grow with the communities it serves. This collaboration brings the prairie perspective into a global conversation about how ecosystem service markets can be made fair, transparent, and genuinely producer-first