Agriculture depends on nature – yet it also contributes significantly to biodiversity loss and land degradation. Conventional farming systems often deplete the very ecosystems they rely on, undermining long-term food security, climate resilience, and livelihoods. To reverse this trend, we must ensure that agricultural systems regenerate rather than exhaust the land.
Monitoring land health
Land health is defined as the capacity of land, relative to its potential, to sustain the delivery of ecosystem services. This includes considerations of biodiversity above and below ground, habitat quality and connectivity, and the ability of landscapes to withstand shocks and deliver multiple benefits over time.
Monitoring land health is a vital step in this transformation. It enables us to assess whether landscapes are ecologically functional, whether the ecosystem services they provide are sustained, and whether interventions (such as restoration projects or nature-based solutions) are delivering their intended outcomes.
Without a clear picture of how ecosystems are functioning within agricultural landscapes, it is challenging to make informed decisions, manage them sustainably, or meet global biodiversity and other environmental targets.
The Land Health Monitoring Framework
Existing tools offer valuable insights into specific elements—such as soil carbon, crop diversity, or land cover—but many are limited in scope. Most:
- Focus on narrow topics (e.g. soil fertility, pollinators, or land use),
- Operate at a single scale (e.g. field or farm level),
- Emphasize agricultural practices rather than ecological outcomes, or
- Rely only on easily accessible proxies and remote sensing and are thus only able to provide approximative information.
The IUCN Land Health Monitoring Framework (LHMF) addresses these gaps. It brings existing tools and indicators together under a coherent, flexible structure, offering a unified approach to assess biodiversity and ecosystem integrity in agricultural landscapes.
Rather than replacing existing tools, the LHMF builds on them—bridging scales, linking biodiversity and ecosystem services, and promoting consistency across field, farm, landscape, and national levels.
The Land Health Monitoring Framework is supported by IKEA Foundation, French Development Agency AFD and Pernod Ricard.
IUCN’s LHMF is distinctive
There is growing demand for a monitoring approach that links biodiversity, ecosystem services, and land use patterns across scales. The LHMF responds by:
- Promoting a balance between remote sensing and field-based observations,
- Enabling users to identify key ecological functions and indicators relevant to their context, and
- Providing structure without being prescriptive.
Target user groups
The Land Health Monitoring Framework is designed to be useful across a wide range of users engaged in agriculture, conservation, and sustainable land management.
- Project managers and implementing partners can use the LHMF to track the ecological outcomes of interventions—whether related to sustainable agriculture, landscape restoration, or Nature-based Solutions. It helps build robust monitoring systems aligned with local priorities and global targets.
- Producers and Producer Organizations can apply the framework to assess and improve the health of their farming systems. Monitoring land health can support stronger market positioning, reduced input dependency, and better resilience to climate stress.
- Governments and national institutions can use the LHMF to integrate biodiversity into agricultural monitoring and reporting. Its multi-scale structure is compatible with national strategies and contributes to biodiversity targets under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, SDGs, and other international commitments.
- Private sector actors, including companies and investors, can rely on the LHMF to demonstrate their contributions to nature-positive production and regenerative practices. The framework supports alignment with global disclosure standards like TNFD and SBTN.
The Land Health Monitoring Framework report
The LHMF report presents the conceptual foundation of the framework, its structure, and how it complements and integrates existing tools and indicators. It outlines key elements such as spatial scales, indicator types, and biodiversity dimensions that form the basis of a robust land health monitoring system.
Publication
2023
Biodiversity is context-specific, and there are no one-size-fits-all indicators or monitoring methodologies. Nevertheless, the lack of common metrics to measure and monitor …
The Guidance note on monitoring biodiversity in agricultural landscapes
IUCN
The Guidance Note offers a practical, step-by-step approach to applying the framework. It walks users through the process of defining objectives, selecting indicators, building and implementing a tailored monitoring plan—while remaining flexible and adaptable to diverse contexts.
Monitoring land health in agricultural landscapes. Guidance note
The Land Health Monitoring platform (coming soon)
To support broader and more consistent use of the LHMF, a digital platform is currently under development. It will guide users through the seven steps of the Guidance Note, help select relevant indicators, and generate a draft monitoring plan. In the future, it will also support data entry, visualization, and cross-site analysis.
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