ENGINEERING//CONSULTING//RESEARCH

Independent Scientific Consulting for Soils, Carbon, and Agroforestry

Ekodama is an independent scientific consulting practice focused on soils, soil health, soil carbon, agroforestry, and sustainable land systems. We help clients design robust approaches, generate credible evidence, and translate complex land-system questions into usable decisions.

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Who we work with

Head of Sustainability
Sustainable Sourcing Manager
Climate & Nature Lead
FLAG & Scope 3 Manager
Regenerative Agriculture Lead
Supply Chain Sustainability Manager
Carbon Portfolio Manager
ESG Reporting Lead
Cocoa Sustainability Manager
Chief Sustainability Officer

Carbon Program Manager
Agronomy Program Manager
Farm Operations Manager
Plantation Manager
Field Operations Director
MRV Lead
Agroforestry Program Coordinator
Carbon Project Developer
NGO Programs Director
Monitoring & Evaluation Officer
Cooperative Manager
Field Agronomist

Research Manager
Soil Scientist
Principal Investigator
Methodology Developer
Standards Technical Lead
Validation & Verification Auditor
Remote Sensing Scientist
Impact Investment Analyst
Nature Finance Due Diligence Lead
Research Program Officer
Policy Officer
Doctoral Researcher

Why Ekodama//Approach

Growing decisions rooted in science

We combine field experience, research-grade methods, and visual-analytical craft to bridge complex science and real-world implementation.

Whether you're designing a rigorous field experiment, establishing a soil carbon baseline, or trying to understand how a complex land system actually behaves, our role is to make the science sound, usable, and grounded in your situation.

Expert review & advisory

An independent expert in your corner

When a service provider is running the work and you need to know the science holds up, we step in as an independent expert. We review the work, give a second opinion, or advise on the specific questions that matter most.

Review the work

An independent read on a provider's methods, design, or results.

A call or second opinion

One question answered well, without a full engagement.

An expert on hand

We step into a running program on the things where expertise counts.

How expert review works →

Services//Eight practice areas

Expertise & Services

Field research, analytical methods, strategic consulting, and science communication across eight complementary practice areas.

Soil Health Evaluation

We help design and interpret soil health evaluations, from comprehensive studies to focused assessments, combining field, laboratory, and research-grade methods. We can deliver this at our scale, or act as scientific advisor to a larger program your team is running.

Soil Carbon & Biomass Assessment

We support credible soil carbon baselines and tree or plant biomass estimation, aligned with the GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard and with the practical reality of supplier programs. We also review existing or planned sampling campaigns, soil or tree, to assess whether the design, depth, bulk density, and uncertainty approach meet the requirements of carbon accounting, not agronomic monitoring alone.

Farm & System Analysis

We build farm-system models, short-term or long-term, that crystallize how different management choices translate into emissions, removals, yields, and system trade-offs.

Experimental & Sampling Design

Statistically robust field experiments and sampling plans, plus review of plans put forward by your team or another service provider. We help you answer: is this design actually fit for the question? Either from first principles or as a second opinion before your campaign begins.

Bespoke Tools & Technical Communication

We turn complex analysis into things people can use day-to-day: interactive dashboards, decision-support apps, hand-drawn system diagrams, maps, and technical syntheses.

Scientific & Technical Training

Tailored training and capability-building. We don't issue professional certifications; we share the working knowledge your teams need to do the job well.

Scientific Literature Review & Decision Briefs

When a decision is being made and the literature is vast or contradictory, we compress the relevant science into a clear, sourced, opinionated brief.

Science Communication & Design

We design websites, illustrations, learning games, and materials for events and courses that carry soil science to a wider audience, mostly for the French Soil Science Society (AFES).

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Recent projects//Selected work

Recent consulting projects and research collaborations

Real projects led by our founder as a consultant, with clients and sites unnamed for confidentiality.

A cocoa agroforestry plot at sunrise, with cocoa pods on understory trees beneath taller shade trees.

Literature review//Global

An ongoing systematic review of what drives cocoa yield variability

A systematic review, now at the full-text stage, of the published evidence on why cocoa yields vary so widely.

Dozens of labelled soil sample tins laid out in a tray, drying before laboratory analysis.

MRV advisory//Multi-country

Choosing a soil carbon monitoring provider for a five-country program

A structured selection of a soil carbon monitoring provider for a multinational agri-food company, from long list to signed contract.

An aerial view of farmland laid out in long rectangular plots.

Field experiment//South America

A shade-by-genotype cocoa trial, designed and planted in 2026

A field trial testing four shade levels against three cocoa genotypes on an irrigated farm, now planted.

Rows of young trees in an agroforestry plantation.

Independent review//West Africa

A second look at the precision of a tree carbon estimate

An independent re-analysis that recomputed a tree carbon estimate's precision at the level its sampling supports.

Ripe red cacao pods hanging from a branch of a cacao tree.

Allometry//Southeast Asia

A site-specific cocoa biomass equation from destructive sampling

Destructive sampling of cocoa trees in a long-term trial, to fit and test an equation for its own trees.

An illustrated bird's-eye view of a river catchment, its fields and forests rendered as a patchwork of earthy colours.

Tool development//Global

Map of Soil Science

An interactive cartography of soil science: 10 domains, 150 entries, 615 sub-branches, and 8 thematic paths. Pannable, zoomable, bilingual.

View all projects →

Insights

GO TO INSIGHTS

Practical lessons and other insightful reflections.

Data & Methods

What Does a High R² Actually Tell You? Model Evaluation Metrics from Soil Carbon to Tree Biomass

Most validation tables report three or four metrics and let them speak for themselves. R², RMSE, model efficiency, KGE, Lin's concordance and RPD mostly recombine three properties of the errors, and each one is blind to something. This piece follows the conditions under which a good score misleads: a wide validation range, a log-scale allometry, stocks scored in place of change, an error below the measurement noise, a threshold borrowed from hydrology. Ends with a minimum score sheet for any validation table. Three interactive tools.

Continue readingNOV 6 2026

Data & Methods

How Do You Calibrate and Validate a Model? A Field Guide from Soil Carbon to Tree Biomass

Calibration means four different things, and a good share of the arguments about validated models are two people using different ones. This piece separates the senses, then walks the workflow they share: why fitting well proves almost nothing, what each level of a data split actually estimates, how the cross-validation scheme you pick encodes a claim about the prediction task, which metrics are worthless on their own, and what it takes for a stated uncertainty to be honest. Ends with ten questions to ask of any modelled number. Three interactive tools.

Continue readingSEP 4 2026

Data & Methods

The Detection Limits of Soil Carbon: What a Measurement Programme Can Actually See

A soil carbon stock is a product of four measurements, and every one carries error. Spatial heterogeneity usually dominates the budget, bulk density is where systematic bias hides, and coarse fragments quietly wreck the arithmetic. What that means in practice: why fixed-depth and equivalent soil mass can differ by more than a hundred percent, how long a real change takes to become visible, what handheld spectroscopy costs you in precision, and which choices actually move the floor. Two interactive tools.

Continue readingAUG 14 2026

Soil Carbon

Does Soil Carbon Saturate? What the Ceiling Is, Where It Sits, and What Happens If You Keep Adding

"Soils will saturate" is used to end arguments, and it carries four separate claims: that a field has stopped gaining, that it has reached equilibrium, that its mineral capacity is exhausted, or that further gain is uneconomic. Only one is saturation. A working guide to which fraction actually fills up, why the most famous plateau in soil science cannot test saturation at all, why published capacity equations disagree by close to a factor of two on the same soil, and where the carbon goes when you keep adding anyway. Four interactive tools.

Continue readingAUG 7 2026

Soil Carbon

How Much Soil Carbon Can a Hectare Gain Per Year? A Benchmark for Removal Rates

A rate on its own means nothing. Whether 0.2, 1 or 5 tonnes of CO₂ per hectare per year is high or low depends on the baseline stock, the sampling depth, the control and the time since the practice started. A calibrated benchmark of soil organic carbon accrual across cover crops, residues, rotations, reduced tillage, organic amendments, agroforestry, grazing and land-use change. It covers the four-per-mille rule of thumb, the saturation curve that makes early rates unrepeatable, and why two careful papers on the same practice can differ tenfold. Four interactive tools.

Continue readingJUL 31 2026

Agroforestry

How Much Carbon Does a Tree Capture Per Year? A Cross-System Benchmark

There is no single per-year rate. A believable figure is a range set by system, stand age, and whether you mean one tree or a hectare, and it spans more than an order of magnitude. A calibrated cross-system benchmark of per-tree and per-hectare sequestration rates, from tropical forest and agroforestry to plantations, farms, cities, and restoration, with the drivers of the spread and sanity checks for any claimed rate. Three interactive tools.

Continue readingJUL 24 2026

Climate & Ecosystems

After the Fire: How Burning Reshapes Soil, and What Comes Back

Fire is not one thing, and neither is its effect on soil. A first-year nutrient flush and a hidden water-repellent layer, erosion in the middle years, and a long-term ledger of lost organic matter against stubbornly stable pyrogenic carbon. What the data show across the short, medium, and long term, from Canadian boreal fires and African savannas to slash-and-burn clearings and cereal stubble, and what you can actually do to help soil recover. Three interactive tools.

Continue readingJUL 17 2026

Data & Methods

Representative of What? When a New Sample Falls Outside Your Model’s Domain

“Take a representative sample” carries two jobs: whether a sample reflects the area you want to describe, and whether a new location sits inside the conditions a calibrated model has actually seen. The applicability domain, the check most monitoring programmes skip, with two interactive tools to test whether a new or resampled point is in-domain.

Continue readingJUL 10 2026

Climate & Ecosystems

Adapting Trees and Forests to a Changing Climate: What Is at Risk, and Where Resilience Can Be Designed

Climate change is already killing trees through hotter droughts, moving the climate that cocoa, coffee, and forests are suited to, and eroding the permanence of forest carbon. What adaptation looks like across four systems, with two interactive tools.

Continue readingJUL 3 2026

Climate & Ecosystems

France on the Edge of a Climate Precipice: Droughts, Heatwaves, and the Collapse Thresholds of Ecosystems

In June 2026, France is living through its most intense heatwave on record, on soils already in deficit. A faithful translation of our French research notes, tracing how the country's vegetation, forests, and farming systems approach their tipping points, and how far and for how long they can hold before collapse. Forty-five references, four interactive tools.

Continue readingJUN 26 2026

Soil Carbon

Adapting Soil Management to a Changing Climate: What Needs to Change, and Where

Soil management designed for yesterday's climate will underperform under tomorrow's. The adaptation response across four agricultural contexts, from tropical cocoa agroforestry to European arable systems, and why soil organic matter is both the most important lever and the hardest to maintain under warming.

Continue readingJUN 19 2026

Biochar

When Biochar Works: The Soil × Climate × Crop Map of Yield Response

Biochar's global yield average sits at ~10–13%, but the average hides the answer: large gains on acidic tropical soils, near zero on temperate silts, sometimes negative. A decision framework for matching feedstock and pyrolysis to the soil and crop in front of you.

Continue readingJUN 12 2026

Biochar

Biochar: Carbon Removal, Soil Response, and the Accounting Question

Biochar is one of the rare carbon removals with a clear definition and a tradable claim. What the H/Corg ratio tells you about permanence, and how the 2026 standards (Verra VM0044, EU CRCF, EBC, Puro) split the credit across biomass owner, pyrolysis operator, farmer, and buyer.

Continue readingJUN 5 2026

Soil Carbon

Signal versus Noise: When a Soil Carbon Change Is Real

Soil carbon change is a small signal, 0.1 to 0.5 Mg C/ha/yr, set against a wider noise floor. Two interactive diagrams to move the dials, and what the 2026 MRV regimes (Verra VM0042 v3.0, GHG Protocol LSR, EU 2024/3012) demand before a change can be called real.

Continue readingMAY 29 2026

Soil Carbon

Is Soil Inorganic Carbon Critical to Include in Your Soil Carbon Accounting?

From 2027, the GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard folds inorganic carbon into the soil carbon pool. When SIC is material, how an unmeasured SIC trend can mask the SOC signal, and what the analytical workflow has to look like.

Continue readingMAY 22 2026

Agroforestry

A Few Trees Hold Most of the Carbon: Why Remnants and Giants Matter in Cocoa Agroforestry

On tropical farms, a small number of large and remnant trees can dominate carbon stocks. Ignoring them distorts science, farm design, and carbon accounting alike.

Continue readingMAY 15 2026

Data & Methods

How Large Should Your Soil Carbon Sampling Campaign Be?

Sample size is a consequence, not a starting point. Fix the scale of inference first, ground variance in published data, commit to 0–60 cm and ESM accounting, and design to the MRV standard your buyer will be audited against.

Continue readingMAY 8 2026

Agroforestry

How to Calculate the Amount of Carbon in a Tree? Methods, Uncertainty, and Accounting

The full accounting chain: from DBH and wood density to a defensible confidence interval. Allometric bias, the retired 0.47 carbon fraction, the Monte Carlo uncertainty budget, and what the 2026 LSR, CCP, and CRCF regimes now demand.

Continue readingMAY 1 2026

Data & Methods

How Do You Model Soil Carbon Change Over Time?

RothC, AMG, Century, DayCent: four models, four different questions they answer best. A decision framework for choosing the right soil carbon model for the claim you need to defend.

Continue readingAPR 24 2026

GO TO INSIGHTS

Ekodama // Field practiceRef 2026-11

Work with us

Let's connect

Interested in collaborating on soil carbon research, agroforestry consulting, or scientific communication projects? Tell us about your project and we will come back to you with a clear, honest first response.

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Note // Images

Some images on this page are AI-generated rather than photographed. How this practice uses AI →