It's one of the first questions we get on a call, and it's the right one to ask. Survival rate is the most readable indicator a restoration partner can put on the table. It's comparable, easy to verify, and it tells a buyer or a fund whether a planting actually held. When a client asks for it, what they're really asking is: do you know what you're doing on the ground.
The honest answer is that there is no single survival rate number for MORFO as a whole. Survival is a function of the planting method and the terrain. Our clients hand us a piece of land. Our job is to find the best ratio between cost and result on that specific land. Survival is one of the elements that defines that ratio, alongside density, species diversity, biomass, and ecological function.
There's a strategic choice behind every method we recommend. This article gives the broad shape of how those choices play out. The way we calibrate them on a given site is the work itself, and a meaningful part of it stays with our clients rather than in a public article.
Three planting profiles, three survival shapes
The same plot of land planted three different ways produces three different survival profiles. Each makes sense in a different context.
| Method | Best for | Survival profile | Cost profile | When to avoid |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Six-month seedlings | APP zones, riparian corridors, sensitive species, steep slopes, regulatory frames requiring high per-individual survival | ~90% at 4 months, close to 80% at year one | Highest. Six-month nursery cycle, individual handling, transport tail | Tight planting windows; large continuous areas where seeding logistics compete on cost |
| Two-to-three-month seedlings | Tight windows, sites where nursery capacity is the bottleneck, soils that let young seedlings catch up with monitoring | Lower than six-month, often 70 to 85% at 4 months in good conditions | Lower per planted unit; faster nursery cycle | Open soils with no shade; high invasive pressure where small seedlings can't compete |
| Muvuca (direct seeding mix) | Large areas, low-to-medium invasive pressure, sites without nearby nursery, terrain that's mechanizable or accessible by drone | Lower per-individual survival; metric shifts to established individuals per hectare and species count | Lowest cost per hectare; simpler logistics; fastest deployment | Heavy invasive grass pressure without a maintenance plan; frames requiring individual seedling traceability |
The muvuca line is where the logic of survival rate as a single number breaks down hardest. Per-individual survival is lower, sometimes meaningfully so, because seeds are predated, fail to germinate, or die in the first weeks. Muvuca compensates with sown volume, simpler logistics (no nursery, no individual transport), faster mechanized deployment, and a much lower cost per hectare. On a site without nursery infrastructure nearby, far from an airport, or where mechanization opens up, the cost-to-result ratio often tips muvuca's way even with lower survival. The relevant metric stops being "what percent of individuals survived" and becomes "how many established individuals per hectare, of how many species, at what cost".
Why the terrain decides
The same method behaves differently depending on what's underneath. Soil texture, organic matter, water retention, slope, access roads, presence of a nursery in the region, distance to an airport for drone logistics, invasive grass pressure, ant pressure, history of land use: all of those move the survival number, the cost, or both. A six-month seedling planted on heavy compacted clay with no shade can underperform a muvuca seeded into a freshly disked, biologically active soil. The opposite can also be true.
What this means is that comparing survival rates between projects without describing the terrain isn't a comparison. It's a slogan. Our reference numbers across recent managed projects sit in the 70 to 85% establishment range at 24 months, but that range is the output of dozens of zone-by-zone decisions, not a target we apply uniformly. Same land can carry a thousand possible restoration plans, and one planting method doesn't work at 5,000 hectares.
MORFO Ri, the platform that makes those decisions tractable
Choosing a planting method zone by zone on a 500-hectare site used to mean weeks of field visits and a final decision shaped by whichever engineer walked the property. With MORFO Ri, the diagnostic combines satellite, soil data, slope, hydrology, fragmentation, and land-use history into a feasibility classification per polygon, validated by a targeted field visit. Method recommendations are produced per zone in days, traceable, and comparable across projects.
The same shift applies after planting. Instead of PDF reports six months after the fact, Ri tracks density, species establishment, invasive cover, and mortality continuously, and surfaces deviations early enough to act on them. A 5-hectare stress signal becomes a corrective intervention within 48 hours, before it scales into a 50-hectare problem.
Drone imagery is one input in the stack. The system is the loop: diagnose, decide, plant, monitor, correct. See how MORFO Ri works →
What we report
On every site we operate, we track survival at four and twelve months for mudas, species establishment at eight and twenty-four months for direct seeding, density and species diversity, soil cover by native and by invasive species, and mortality with spatial breakdown. When carbon is in scope, we add above-ground biomass measurement: 5.47 tCO₂e/ha at seven months on the Belém site with Embrapa and Google, 9.2 tCO₂e/ha at three years on a former mining site in French Guiana. When relevant, bioacoustic monitoring adds an ecological signal beyond plant cover (106 bird species identified at Belém at seven months).
We report ranges rather than averages because averages hide where mortality concentrates, why it happened, and what we did about it. That's what the numbers are for. More on the data side here: how four data sources become one decision and soil is the forgotten variable in restoration economics.
When survival becomes a commitment
The standard restoration contract is cost-plus. The provider gets paid for inputs (mudas planted, hectares prepared, days in the field) and carries no risk on whether the planting actually establishes. If 30% of the seedlings fail in the first year, the cost of replanting falls on the client. The provider has no downside if the site underdelivers, and no upside if it overdelivers. Almost every operator on the Brazilian restoration market works this way.
We're open to a different structure. For partners who want it, we put part of our remuneration at risk against outcome metrics agreed upfront: survival, establishment, biomass at defined monitoring points. The exact mechanics vary by project. The principle stays the same: we share the risk because we stand behind what we plant, not just behind the act of planting it.
This is only credible because of the diagnostic and monitoring stack behind it. We project performance per zone before we plant, and verify it continuously after. We commit on what the land can actually deliver, zone by zone, not on a single number applied uniformly to a heterogeneous site. A blanket survival commitment on fragmented land with mixed slope, soil, and invasive pressure isn't a serious commitment. A zone-by-zone projection, with a method matched to each zone and a monitoring stack that catches deviations early, is. That's the gap we're trying to close.
In practice
Survival rate is the right question to ask. The answer that's useful is the one that explains what survival will be on your specific land, given your terrain, your invasive pressure, your access, and the method we're recommending. That answer takes a diagnostic to produce, and a monitoring stack to verify over time.
Our value as a partner is the ability to adapt the method to the land, not to defend a single approach. The full mechanics of how we calibrate that adaptation stay where they belong, in the work we do with our clients. What we share here is the logic, not the recipe.
Pascal Asselin, Co-founder and General Manager, MORFO
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