A new research tie with the University of Leeds

We have signed a three-year arrangement with the restoration ecology lab at the University of Leeds to check our methods and publish what works and, just as importantly, what does not. Dr Amara Okonkwo's existing ties to the lab helped open the door, but the agreement stands on its own terms.

Charities are prone to reporting only their wins, and we are not immune to the pull of it. A fundraising page wants a clean success story, and over time that pressure quietly bends what gets measured and what gets mentioned. An outside lab is a corrective, because it has no stake in our fundraising whatsoever.

The exchange is straightforward. Their students and researchers get real field sites across seven landscapes and years of data to work with, which is hard to come by. We get our claims tested by people who are paid to be sceptical and who lose nothing by finding us wrong.

The first joint output was the carbon method paper that passed peer review this spring. The lab pushed us to redo two years of plot data under a stricter standard, and the paper is better and more honest for it.

The next piece is the one we are more nervous about, a hard look at our seedling survival rates across all seven sites, due next year. Survival is the number that most flatters us when we report it ourselves and the one most worth checking independently.

We have agreed in advance to publish that survival study whatever it says. Agreeing before we see the results is the only version of the commitment that means anything. If the numbers are worse than we hope, that is exactly the kind of thing this arrangement exists to surface.