Field Notes
A field journal for people who manage land. It records what you saw, where you stood and what you did — and it works with no signal, because that’s where the land is.
A capture is a photo, a coordinate, a time, and whatever you know about what you’re looking at — a plant, a fence post, a check-in on last spring’s cuttings. Photograph it, say what it is, and it’s saved before you’ve taken three steps.
Everything lives on the phone in a plain SQLite database. There is no account to make, no server to sign into, and no feed. Nothing is uploaded anywhere unless you set up a backup and choose where it goes. That isn’t a privacy stance we bolted on afterwards; it’s the only architecture that works when you’re standing in a creek bottom with one bar.
What it does
The desk, and what it hands out
Field Notes has a desktop side — a companion for the office that receives the phone’s record over your own network, your own Drive, or a backup file, and never starts from a blank page. Records are born in the field; the desk is where you go back over them — review a contributor’s edits, fix a species call, and turn the record into what the work needs next.
The desk · review queueThe export bench is the point of it. The same record becomes a drafted map plate as a PNG, a report as a PDF you can hand your biologist or the county program office, the identical document as a Word file when they want to edit it, or an interactive HTML map you can put on a website. Field record locations stay off every export until you deliberately switch them on.
Plate · PNG
Report · PDFThe rules it’s built to
Nothing leaves the phone without you doing something. The phone is where records are born; the desk only ever receives. A machine’s suggestion is never written down as fact. Numbers you’d want to trust later — survival, acreage — are computed from the record, not remembered at the tailgate. And the whole database walks out the door in open formats whenever you ask, because your record of your land should not be hostage to our app.
Where it is
In daily use on the 98.78 acres this site documents — one phone, one desk, every capture on this property since August. It is not in the Play Store yet and there is no sign-up list; syncing between devices is designed and being built, and we’d rather break it ourselves than hand it to you first. When it’s ready for strangers, this page will say so.
On the data
Coordinates of private land are sensitive, and we treat them that way for the same reason this site publishes species observations at section level and keeps precise points off the map. What the app collects stays on the device unless you move it. The full accounting — every case where a byte leaves the phone, and why — is on the privacy page. It’s short, and it’s honest about the one time we got it wrong.