Landscape Care Initiative – Digital Registration, Evaluation and Reporting for Nature Reserves

Challenge

To access international funding, the credibility of a conservation portfolio depends on proving that every reserve and its conservation effort is legitimate. LCI's process was manual and fragmented, with no traceability or centralized dashboard, which made it hard to verify conservation status and perform additional verifications  and increased the risk of registering land without real conservation commitment, such as commercial plantations or cattle ranches.

The challenge was to turn this process into a purpose-built digital product tailored to LCI's specific workflow, rather than relying on generic software, while meeting the strict UK charities regulations.

Solution

Activeone partnered with Green levers’LCI from requirements definition through development and deployment of the platform. The team built a web application with a Vue.js frontend, a Django backend, and a PostgreSQL database, with file storage on Amazon S3 and transactional email through AWS SES. Access is passwordless, using one-time code verification.

The platform organizes work by role: reserve representatives register and maintain their information; external evaluators review each reserve in two stages; and LCI's administrators oversee the entire process and control what gets published. Every evaluation is recorded with its author and date, and reserve boundaries are displayed on maps from geographic files (shapefile, KML, GeoJSON).

Only reserves that pass the evaluation are published as public profiles, in a catalog that can be filtered and sorted for easy browsing.

Impact

With the platform, LCI moves from a manual process that is hard to audit to a standardized, traceable verification workflow.

Key benefits include:

•       The entire application and evaluation process in a single digital platform.

•       Full traceability: a history of every reserve with author and date.

•       Consistent evaluation criteria that reduce the risk of approving reserves that do not meet them.

•       A public portfolio of verified reserves, ready to present to donors and funding agencies.

•       Clear roles and permissions for reserve managers, evaluators, and administrators.

•       A modern technology foundation, ready for advanced analyses in future phases.

For LCI, the result is a purpose-built tool that protects the credibility of its portfolio and supports its mission to connect nature reserves with worldwide donors to support conservation.