Neotropic Field Systems
Neotropic Field Systems brings together a growing collection of digital tools created around real needs encountered in natural history, ecological interpretation and fieldwork.
These projects are not built simply because an application can be made.
Each begins with a practical question: Can this make fieldwork easier? Can it help organise information that would otherwise be lost? Can it improve the way we document, study or understand nature?
The result is a growing ecosystem of independent applications and systems, each designed for a specific purpose but connected by the same principle:
Technology should help us pay closer attention to nature, not distract us from it.
TACHIGALI
Ecological Monitoring Infrastructure
Ecological observations are easy to collect.
Keeping them organised, reviewable and useful through years of fieldwork is much harder.
TACHIGALI is being built as infrastructure for long-term ecological monitoring: a system connecting field observations with the sites, projects, people and biological information that give those observations context.
Its development began with a real monitoring project in Costa Rica rather than with a hypothetical software specification. Field capture, offline workflows, ecological records, organisational structure and data review are therefore being developed around the conditions in which the system is actually expected to work.
The first implementation is currently being tested in the field while the underlying platform is being developed for use across other ecological sites and monitoring projects.
Status: Field pilot
Neotropic Calendar
A calendar for lives that do not revolve around an office.
Fieldwork has its own sense of time.
Migration seasons, flowering and fruiting periods, expeditions, surveys, weather, biological events, projects and observations rarely fit neatly into a conventional work calendar.
Neotropic Calendar was created for naturalists, guides, photographers, researchers and other people whose work and interests regularly take them into the field.
It provides a dedicated place for organising the events, projects and natural phenomena worth remembering without turning them into another corporate productivity system.
Neotropic Calendar is designed as a single-purchase application rather than another permanent subscription.
Status: Ready
Explore Neotropic Calendar →
Why I Build Them
I spend much of my time working outdoors: observing wildlife, guiding, documenting species, teaching and trying to understand what is happening around me.
Over time, I kept encountering small problems that existing software was never quite designed to solve.
Sometimes the answer was a notebook.
Sometimes a spreadsheet.
And sometimes the problem was interesting enough to justify building something different.
Neotropic Field Systems grew from those moments.
I am not interested in making software simply because software can be made.
I am interested in building tools that make fieldwork clearer, information harder to lose, and long-term observation more useful.
Built in the field. Improved in the field.
Some of these tools are personal.
Others may eventually serve researchers, reserves, naturalists, conservation projects and organisations managing their own ecological information.
What connects them is not a particular technology.
It is a way of working:
observe carefully, identify the real problem, build only what is useful, and return it to the field to see whether it survives contact with reality.
If you manage a biological reserve, monitoring project, research site or other field programme and see a potential use for TACHIGALI, I would be interested in hearing about the work you are doing.
Discuss a field implementation →