Manchón Guamuchal is the biggest mangrove ecosystem in Guatemala. It is a critical habitat that provides ecosystem services underpinning community livelihoods on the southern Pacific coast. The mangrove forest protects the coast from flooding, coastal storms, and other disasters – which are projected to increase in severity with climate change – and serves as a source of income for the inhabitants of the reserve. Intensive agriculture in parts of the landscape and ongoing forest loss in the mangrove reserve have seriously degraded the Manchón Guamuchal ecosystem and the services that it provides.

The Rainforest Alliance, Solidaridad, and other partners (hereafter “the partners”) are restoring and conserving the mangrove forests on the coast to ensure Manchón Guamuchal remains an intact and resilient ecosystem that provides natural protection from flooding events. Flooding, sedimentation, and low downstream water flow in the riparian zones are major concerns for communities and companies that rely on the Manchón Guamuchal ecosystem for subsistence and production. Restoring major riparian zones in the landscape can help to mitigate these risks and effects.

To monitor restoration efforts in the Manchón Guamuchal landscape – which includes most of the Manchón Guamuchal Reserve – the partners piloted LandScale. LandScale is a comprehensive landscape assessment service that works with users to create a monitoring system.

The LandScale assessment in the Manchón Guamuchal landscape was conducted in 2021, with subsequent assessments planned for every three years. Most of the data for the assessment was collected from public and private sources of existing data. The assessment indicators identified by LandScale included the number of degraded hectares, degradation rate per year, restoration rate per year, and species used for restoration. Unfortunately, much of the public information available was more than five years old, making it difficult to obtain a reliable base for deep analysis. For follow up evaluations, LandScale and the partners will explore other sources of data, including data collected through a stakeholder reporting platform developed for the project.

The holistic assessment conducted by LandScale allowed the partners to measure landscape-level impacts of restoration activities and co-benefits of restoration, such as biodiversity conservation, poverty reduction, access to basic services, and water quantity and quality. The LandScale assessment helped to establish a baseline of landscape-scale sustainability and served as a framework to support the landscape initiative in setting goals and targets for a landscape action plan. The targets in the action plan were designed to align with the LandScale indicators where possible, to credibly track progress towards those goals in repeat assessments and communicate the sustainability performance of the landscape. The LandScale assessment will be applied every three years, enabling the partners to track progress, replicate successful activities, and adaptively manage interventions that are not working.

A narrative report and the landscape action plan are available on the LandScale platform. These include a summary of key results from the assessment, visualizations, and a full table of results.