Written by Tarah Stafford

“Silvi is addressing the problem of habitat loss and degradation of ecosystem services, two of the biggest threats we face to the stability of our Planet. Trees are ancient, instrumental keystone species for life on land. They truly are a foundation to the rest of life on earth and planetary cycles at large. We can't afford to continue wiping out what remains of them. 

If only we can recover them, nature will do the rest.” - Djimo Serodio, Silvi

Mission: To Help a Billion People Plant a Trillion Trees

Silvi is helping build economic and coordination tools to contribute to the trillion tree target through: 

• Upfront project funding (Tree-Commitments via Tree Forwards) to incentivize and reward performance-based tree stewardship

• Extreme traceability and attribution of new trees, not just for accountability and inventorying, but to unleash the community effects needed for tree-planting to become a thing!

• Silvi is also partnering with JustLearn to introduce reforestation to homes and schools.

Results to Date: $10K+ 

During the first round while at Kernel block 5, a sister organization (AgroforestDAO) was unsuccessful in getting their grant approved on time so Silvi contributed to their project to get them up and running. 

During the 2nd round of Gitcoin Grants funding resulted in work by DesignRegen, led by Adam French, on some incredible discovery work and an early version of the website. He has since done the same for dMeter.

The bulk of Silvi’s Gitcoin grant funding has gone to support field operations. Most notably in Kenya subsidizing and supporting Eliud, a former primary teacher turned reforestation champion, with technology and science. For example, some of the funds were used to equip him with a smartphone, internet airtime and transportation. Not only is this helping him build capacity with nurseries, but also helping him move around Kenya. 

Silvi is also working in urban and rural centers on forestry programs.

“It’s really a time to come together, not as siloed projects and products but to really strive for interoperability and composability and knowledge transfer.” — Djimo Serodio, Silvi

Additional Needs

Continued Gitcoin support will help scale these initiatives and ramp up technology grants as well as scale the economics of trees. Up until now the focus has been on building a stack to serve the human-centric stages of the tree lifecycle while setting a strong and reliable data foundation from which other Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) can happen. 

Silvi plans to collaborate with other projects and technologies on techniques for statistical sampling of ground truth as well as remote sensing inference. And ultimately, to vertically integrate with carbon-certifying projects.

How to Get Involved

Here are some ways to learn more & to get involved:

• Silvi Tree Stewardship Protocol - Gitcoin Grant 

• Website: https://www.silvi.earth

• Twitter: @silviDAO