Guidelines changelog

News, updates, and changes to the LandScale guidelines and documentation, organized by date.

Instead of maintaining version numbers for the guidelines, all updates will now be tracked through this changelog for greater transparency and ease of reference.

2 December 2025

What’s new?

The following updates have been made:

Revised wording in the regenerative agriculture section of the assessment guidelines to replace all mentions of 'the lens' with 'the assessment lens' for clearer, more consistent terminology.

18 November 2025

What’s new?

The following updates have been made:

The regenerative agriculture assessment lens has been published. This includes a section in the assessment guidelines that outlines its purpose, structure, and provides supplemental measurement guidance, as well as a detailed technical document on the lens available for download.

24 September 2025

What’s new?

The following updates have been made:

The reassessment guidelines are now live, providing step-by-step instructions for conducting a reassessment in LandScale, consistent with the platform design.
Removed the requirement to demonstrate good faith efforts to recruit two local reviewers per indicator. Instead, the review criteria for the first review now specify that there must be at least one local reviewer per indicator.
Updated the titles of the local review and final validation sections to better reflect the workflow. Assessment results do not need to be actively submitted by the assessment team for these stages; they proceed automatically from the first review once feedback is addressed.
Added the Positive Tipping Points Toolkit to the 'further reading and resources' hint in 'Complete the assessment', offering guidance on navigating systemic change in complex systems.

9 July 2025

What’s new?

We’ve made a few minor updates to the assessment guidelines to strengthen guidance and support better planning:

Added a brief description at the start of 'Register assessment team members' to clarify what an assessment team is and what it does.
Moved 'Identify and register local reviewers' to Step A to highlight the importance of early planning and budgeting, even though the local review takes place in Step C.
Included a note in 'Select data resources' to encourage assessment teams to proactively consider how they might address any data gaps or data-deficient metrics in future assessments.

20 May 2025

What’s new?

The LandScale team is thrilled to launch our new guidelines on GitBook.

We've transitioned from static PDF guidelines (version 1.1) to a dynamic GitBook format for easier access and maintenance.
- The new format includes AI-powered search functionality, the ability to export content as a PDF, and a feedback rating system to capture user satisfaction with the guidelines.
The guidelines content has been updated to reflect the revised workflow and platform design.
The categorizations of indicators and metrics in the assessment framework have been streamlined.
- Previously:
  - Indicators were categorized as core, landscape-dependent, optional, or custom.
  - Metrics were categorized as required, recommended, or user-defined.
- Now:
  - Indicators are categorized as either core or additional.
  - Metrics are categorized as either essential or complementary.

Previous guidelines documents

Before May 2025, the LandScale guidelines (version 1.1) were provided as step-specific PDF documents. All previous guideline documents are available for download below:

102KB

Getting Started_V1.1 Assessment Guidelines

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219KB

Step 1. Preparation_V1.1 Assessment Guidelines

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175KB

Step 2. Boundary Selection_V1.1 Assessment Guidelines.pdf

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Open