Guides and documents

Why financing the return of nature is blocked by the cost of proving it, and how three cheap streams that are each unreliable alone become one reading you can pay against.

Data model, the seven readings with their exact rules, the verdict, confidence and maturity, the API, and what is specified but not yet built.

Life node v1: a single solar-powered 4G box that hears (BirdNET), reads two wired soil probes and posts to the oracle. No farm network, no gateway, no WiFi. About €809 a node in parts, tamper guard and bat microphone included, plus tools bought once. Order list with suppliers and direct order links, prices and stock checked 2026-09-24, after the first order for the computer and probes fell through.

Five stages from a heap of parcels to a node on a post, each one ending in a measured number rather than a feeling. Bench electronics, then the power chain, then the box, then the post, then a two-week soak. Includes the measurement sheet and the list of claims the bench is there to falsify.

Net ecosystem carbon balance as a yearly range from the three streams, credits issued for the lower bound, and a worked example on two Oncra land projects: Horaholm and Boer in Natuur.

A design for paying land stewards on a verified life state: a published tariff per hectare-season, a connection payment so nobody fronts the hardware, and release as confidence grows. Proposal, open for comment. Nothing is being paid yet.

The market behind the standard kit: sound recorders, soil probes, gateways and ready-made devices available today, with prices, where to buy in Europe, and the three alternative sets for places the single 4G node does not suit.

Register a place, watch the satellite readings arrive, put up a node or an alternative set, deliver the data. Step by step, with the exact commands.

Height, orientation, spacing, schedule and maintenance for the node and for the alternative sets, so that recordings from different places are comparable.

Depth, position, backfill and marking for moisture and temperature probes, wiring them into the node, and the LoRaWAN join for probes that stand alone.

How detections, acoustic indices and soil readings get into the oracle: the node, direct API, The Things Stack webhook, BirdNET-Pi, AudioMoth cards, BirdWeather.

Who does what in a life-oracle network: steward, installer, verifier, consumer, methodologist, operator, and software agents.

Endpoints, authentication, and examples for reading verdicts and delivering data. Machine-readable spec at /api/v1/openapi.json.

Exactly what the oracle does with Sentinel-2 for each place, which free sources it uses, and the gotchas it handles.

What the Cycling reading takes from the node's own soil probes with nobody visiting, tested on twelve years of the Twente soil moisture network: what it sees, how much it moves where nothing changed, and the thresholds that follow.

The sound stream does not invent its own bird method. Which birds count comes from the farmland bird index of the Nature Restoration Regulation, which the EU carbon farming rules also name; how people count them from Sovon's farmland point counts; when BirdNET can be believed from TABMON's validation; how to share the data from Camtrap DP. Checked 19 October 2026.

What a detection actually is, which claims about birds and bats it can carry, and the statistics that give each claim a confidence level: a calibrated threshold per species, presence as a probability, activity instead of days heard, numbers of birds only with counts beside the nodes, and money on the lower bound. With a first calibration run on TABMON's open expert labels. Checked 27 October 2026.

Repository layout, how to run the stack, how to propose a method change, and the house rules.

A scan of credit methodologies, scientific condition frameworks, Dutch farmland indicator sets and sensor products, checked 2026-09-12, rechecked for devices on 2026-09-13 and for open-source alternatives on 2026-09-16, and an honest account of which parts of this design are borrowed and which are not.

What Restor holds per site, what its APIs allow, what the terms permit, and how the oracle now pulls the useful layers straight from their open sources. Checked 2026-09-12.