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First U.S. LandScale assessment puts new regenerative agriculture lens into practice
What happens when a landscape already has plenty of data, but no single picture of what it all means? In Kansas’ 800,000-acre Rattlesnake Creek watershed, a pioneering assessment is showing how connecting evidence across agriculture, water, ecosystems and communities can reveal new insights, while putting a new regenerative agriculture approach to the test.
The missing piece was not more data
Kansas has become the first landscape in the United States to complete a validated LandScale assessment, marking a significant new step in how landscape sustainability and regenerative agriculture can be assessed together.
Led by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) across the 800,000-acre Rattlesnake Creek watershed, the assessment also became the first to put LandScale’s Regenerative Agriculture Assessment Lens into practice. But the significance of the assessment goes beyond two firsts. In a landscape already rich in environmental and agricultural data, it tested whether independent information from different sources and scales could be brought together to reveal a clearer, more integrated picture of sustainability.
Working with local stakeholders, TNC used the LandScale framework to examine sustainability across ecosystems, human well-being, governance and production. Rather than simply adding another layer of data, the assessment brought together information from multiple public sources and analyzed it against the needs and priorities of the landscape. In doing so, it demonstrated a potentially important role for LandScale in data-rich contexts: turning dispersed evidence into coherent landscape-level information that can better inform strategy and action.
That role is particularly relevant in Rattlesnake Creek, where one resource connects many of the landscape’s most pressing issues: water.
The watershed supports a significant agricultural economy that relies heavily on groundwater irrigation. It is also home to the Quivira National Wildlife Refuge, a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance that provides critical habitat for migratory birds.
These demands increasingly interact. Groundwater withdrawals for irrigation have contributed to declining streamflow, particularly during dry years, complicating water availability for the refuge and highlighting the relationship between agricultural production, water management and ecosystem health.
Understanding those pressures requires more than examining agriculture, water or biodiversity independently. The Rattlesnake Creek assessment sought to bring those different dimensions into the same frame.
Connecting existing evidence across the landscape
Working with local stakeholders, TNC selected 37 metrics from more than 100 potential LandScale indicators. The final selection covered LandScale’s four pillars –ecosystems, human well-being, governance and production – with seven metrics also drawn from the Regenerative Agriculture Assessment Lens.
Analyzing those data together allowed different aspects of the landscape to be considered alongside one another and transformed scattered datasets into information that could respond more directly to landscape priorities.
Water data, for example, can document water quantity and quality, while agricultural data can provide insight into water consumption and irrigation systems across the landscape. Information on government incentive programmes for farmers, alongside other socioeconomic indicators, helps describe the conditions facing people and communities.
The LandScale assessment provided a common framework for analyzing these different data sources and turning them into landscape-level information that can support shared understanding, strategies and action.
The process also exposed some of the challenges of applying a global framework in a new context.
Several standard LandScale indicators did not translate directly to the regulatory and agricultural conditions of Rattlesnake Creek. In other cases, datasets organized around political or administrative boundaries had to be adapted to reflect the watershed itself.
Those findings are now providing practical lessons for future applications. TNC has identified opportunities to streamline indicator sets for U.S. agricultural landscapes, strengthen guidance for assessment teams and further clarify how companies could use assessment results to inform landscape-level contributions and investments.
What the Kansas assessment means for LandScale
Rattlesnake Creek represents more than LandScale’s expansion into a new country. It tests how the framework can function in landscapes where the challenge is not necessarily a lack of data, but how to analyze and connect data collected by different actors, at different scales and for different purposes so that it becomes useful information for landscape decision-making.
That distinguishes the Kansas experience from some previous LandScale applications, where assessments have also helped address foundational data gaps, strengthen local assessment capacity or support landscape governance.
The Rattlesnake Creek assessment instead demonstrated the framework’s potential to help surface new insights and build shared understanding in a complex, water-constrained agricultural landscape, according to TNC’s assessment report.
The lessons will now extend beyond Kansas.
TNC plans to continue working with LandScale to support further applications of the framework in North America, strengthen guidance for U.S.-based assessments and contribute to ongoing development of the platform and its indicators. Priorities include streamlined approaches for U.S. agricultural contexts, greater clarity around corporate contribution and claims, and opportunities to compare learning across assessment sites. TNC is also conducting a Landscape Initiative Maturity (LIM) evaluation in Rattlesnake Creek — the first Landscape Initiative Maturity evaluation in the United States — adding another important dimension to the landscape’s role as a learning ground for LandScale.
For companies, governments and other organizations seeking to understand sustainability beyond individual farms or projects, the Rattlesnake Creek experience points to another potential role for landscape assessment: connecting and analyzing data across environmental, social, governance and production systems to provide more coherent information about conditions across a place.
In Kansas, that meant starting not with a search for more data, but with a different question: What can be understood when dispersed data are brought together, analyzed and transformed into information that can guide strategy and action?
The first validated U.S. LandScale assessment has begun to provide an answer.
The Rattlesnake Creek LandScale assessment was led by The Nature Conservancy with engagement from local stakeholders and validation from local reviewers. It is the first validated LandScale assessment in the United States and the first landscape assessment to apply the Regenerative Agriculture Assessment Lens. TNC is also conducting the first U.S. Landscape Initiative Maturity evaluation in the landscape.