Terraso™: Building a sustainable future

Nature’s wake-up call to humanity could not be any louder amid multiple intersecting crises—food insecurity, degrading forests and agricultural soils, growing water scarcity, accelerating loss of biodiversity, destructive impacts from weather events, and deepening poverty and inequality. Local leaders and land stewards alike struggle with the lack of tools, data, training, and funding they need to create informed solutions for their land management efforts.

The Terraso team saw a tremendous opportunity to fill this critical gap by building technology that helped community leaders make better decisions and find funding for their landscapes. We started in 2019 by interviewing local landscape leaders around the world to learn what worked for them and what didn’t.

We built an open-source platform and tested each release with about a dozen local leadership teams on every major continent. Over time, Terraso Story Maps became the platform’s focus. A Terraso story map is an interactive, web-based story that combines map data, photos, video, audio, and narrative on a map. Terraso Story Maps is the free, open-source app for creating story maps, built for nonprofits, NGOs, and community groups who want to share advocacy and impact stories grounded in place.

In 2022, Terraso also took on stewardship of the Land Potential Knowledge System (LandPKS), a suite of free mobile apps that helps land managers understand the long-term potential of their land based on its soil, topography, and climate. LandPKS was created in 2013 by the USDA Agricultural Research Service at the Jornada Experimental Range, with funding from USAID. The original app, LandPKS Classic, has been trusted by tens of thousands of users for more than a decade. In 2024, Terraso launched LandPKS Soil ID, a redesigned app that helps farmers, ranchers, and researchers identify soils in the field without a lab.

In 2026, Terraso graduated from Tech Matters to become an independent nonprofit project fiscally sponsored by Inquiring Systems Inc. It continues to develop Terraso Story Maps and the LandPKS mobile apps.

Terraso’s partners include Rainforest Alliance, Conservation International, UNDP, Commonland, EcoAgriculture Partners, Paani Earth, Sustainable Harvest International, the Institute of Soil Protection of Ukraine, and the Association for Farmers Rights Defense. Terraso’s major funders are Frey Charitable Foundation, 11th Hour Project, INNW Fund, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Skoll Foundation, and the Cisco Foundation.

If you are a potential Terraso or LandPKS user, or someone who funds efforts at the local level, please get in touch with us at [email protected] or by signing up for Terraso updates.