Read and download NatQuantA — an open architecture for representing the change of nature without erasing the singularity of territories.
A global, open architecture for representing how nature changes — one that preserves the heterogeneity of ecosystems and resists reduction to universal, fungible units. NatQuantA combines a socio-ecological graph, typed physical state vectors, Earth observation, field measurement, scientific and ancestral knowledge, and Essential AI under human accountability.
NatQuantA is not a standard. It is an open reference implementation — a way of organizing how we observe, measure, and account for the natural world so that a river, a reef, or a forest is never silently converted into an interchangeable unit of "nature" in general. It is offered for adoption, critique, and extension by the scientific and policy community, not as a fixed protocol to be imposed.
I wrote NatQuantA because I kept seeing the same failure repeat across the energy, environmental, and financial systems I have modelled since 2007: once nature is reduced to a single number — a ton of CO₂, a biodiversity credit, a hectare-equivalent — the very thing that made a place worth protecting disappears from the model. Physics taught me that you cannot describe a system by discarding its structure. NatQuantA is my attempt to bring that discipline to natural capital: an architecture where territories, species, and communities keep their identity inside the accounting, instead of being erased by it.
Most natural-capital and carbon-accounting systems today share a hidden assumption: that ecological value can be commensurated — converted into a single common unit and traded against any other unit of the same type. NatQuantA starts from the opposite premise. Ecosystems are heterogeneous, place-specific, and only partially, and locally, commensurable. An architecture that ignores this loses the very information that should drive protection, restoration, and accountability.
NatQuantA organizes its components into four interacting layers, grounded throughout in physics, Earth observation, and human-accountable AI.
The Entity–Event–Flow ontology maps territories, species, and communities as entities, linked through events and flows into a single socio-ecological graph.
Each entity carries a typed state vector, constrained by physical balances, so change is tracked without collapsing distinct quantities into one.
Earth observation, field measurement, scientific literature, and ancestral knowledge feed the graph as complementary, cross-validated sources of evidence.
A human-accountable intelligence layer — deliberately distinct from generative AI — integrates these sources into the five ledgers described below.
Information organizes through five ledgers that together represent the full lifecycle of natural-capital accounting.
Together, entities, events, and flows form the socio-ecological graph — the structural backbone that lets NatQuantA represent an ecosystem's history and relationships, not just a snapshot value.
The territories, ecosystems, species, and communities being described — each with a persistent identity across time.
Discrete occurrences that change an entity's state: an extraction, a restoration, a disturbance, a policy decision.
Physical, energetic, and service flows connecting entities to one another — water, carbon, species migration, ecosystem services.
NatQuantA treats scientific literature and ancestral, Indigenous, and local knowledge as complementary evidence streams — not as a hierarchy where one silently overrides the other. This matters directly for data sovereignty, and for the many decisions in natural-capital accounting that concern Indigenous rights over territory and knowledge.
Two hectares of forest are not interchangeable simply because they share an area. NatQuantA formalizes this by treating commensurability as limited and context-dependent rather than universal: quantities can be compared only where a well-defined physical or ecological basis for comparison exists — never by default. This directly informs how the architecture treats critical natural capital, causal attribution, and biodiversity and nature credits.
Both full editions are published on Zenodo under CC BY 4.0 — free to read, download, and redistribute with attribution.
González G., M.F. (2026). NatQuantA: Natural Quantification Architecture — A Global Entity–Event–Flow Architecture for Representing Nature Change and Natural-Capital Accounting. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22084590
@misc{gonzalez2026natquanta,
author = {González G., María Fernanda},
title = {NatQuantA: Natural Quantification Architecture --
A Global Entity-Event-Flow Architecture for
Representing Nature Change and Natural-Capital
Accounting},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Zenodo},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.22084590},
url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22084590}
}
NatQuantA is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. You are free to share and adapt the material for any purpose, provided you give appropriate credit to María Fernanda González and cite the record above.
NatQuantA is offered as an open reference implementation, not a finished standard — feedback, critique, and proposals for collaboration are genuinely welcome.
Write directly with comments on the architecture, questions about applying it to a specific territory or sector, or proposals for research and implementation collaboration. Every message is read personally.
✉ Write to María Fernanda