Kenya's Arid and Semi-Arid Lands — the ASALs — cover more than 80% of the country's landmass and are home to over a third of its people. They are also where tree planting goes to be humbled. Rainfall is erratic, soils are fragile, and the gap between a good planting season and a devastating one can be a matter of weeks. In these conditions, planting a seedling is a wager, and most conventional campaigns lose it.
In the drylands of Eastern Kenya where our teams work, we have seen donated seedlings arrive by the lorry-load — beautiful, nursery-raised stock — only to be planted into the wrong week of the season, on the wrong slope, and abandoned to the next dry spell. Mortality rates of 70–80% in such campaigns are not unusual. The tragedy is that this is largely preventable.
The information that dies with the seedling
When an unmarked seedling dies, it takes its story with it. Was it planted too late? Was the micro-site too exposed? Did the species simply not belong at that elevation? Without per-tree identity, a campaign's failures are a single, unexplainable number — and the next campaign repeats them.
Localized seed scanning changes this. Each TreePassport seedling carries a QR tag from the nursery bag onward. At the moment of planting, the planter's phone records the exact coordinates, the species, the planting date, a photograph, and the initial height. From that moment, every observation — growth, stress, browsing damage, death — attaches to a precise place and time.
Turning mortality into a map
Aggregated, those records do something remarkable: they turn mortality into a map. We can see that Moringa oleifera planted on the leeward side of a ridge in the first week of the short rains is thriving, while the same species planted two weeks later, 400 metres away, is struggling. We can see which nurseries' stock establishes well and which arrives root-bound. We can see where browsing pressure makes fencing worth the cost.
This is what "localized" really means — not just GPS dots on a map, but planting decisions tuned to the specific micro-geography of each site, informed by the verified fate of every tree that came before. In the ASALs, where the margin for error is thinnest, that feedback loop is the difference between greening a hillside and decorating it briefly.
Our field data from the past seasons shows QR-tracked, follow-up-scheduled plantings holding survival rates dramatically above the regional norms. The technology is simple. The discipline it enforces — return, look, record — is the actual innovation.