Who this is for
Farm cluster groups, catchment partnerships, rivers trusts running farmer-led delivery, CICs coordinating across landholdings. You need a single map your members can contribute to, evidence for funder bids that gracefully handles incomplete coverage, and a workspace built around the fact that you're recruiting your network as you go, not running a finished one.
What it does for you
- Mapping — One catchment-scale map across all member holdings, with recruitment status surfaced as a first-class layer.
- Flooding and wetlands — Catchment hydrology, cumulative natural flood management analysis, NFM design at landscape scale.
- Species and habitats — Cluster-wide habitat baselines, catchment connectivity, BNG potential where applicable.
- Satellite data — Landscape-scale change visible across the cluster that no single member holding would see in isolation.
- Communities and collaboration — The recruitment-curve map at the heart of how the cluster grows.
Collaboration tools built in
Running a cluster is people-work, not just spatial-analysis work. Ecology App includes the surfaces you need to run the network alongside the data:
- Citizen science — community-collected observations (iRecord, iNaturalist, eDNA campaigns) flow into the catchment evidence base alongside professional survey data, attributed and licensed correctly.
- Volunteer coordination — schedule work parties, track impact hours, reconcile volunteer effort against habitat outcomes. Integrates with established tools like Better Impact where you already use them.
- Public engagement — site stories, project narratives, and live progress dashboards suitable for community newsletters, funder updates, and the public-facing side of the cluster's story.
- Events — workshops, farm walks, training days, volunteer activities — integrated with the event tools the cluster already uses (Eventbrite, Lu.ma).
- Communications — connect to the cluster's existing mailing list and CRM (Brevo, Mailchimp) so the spatial story and the people story stay joined up.
The principle: keep the data, maps, and analysis on Ecology App; integrate with the best-in-class vendor tools the cluster is already using for events, volunteers, email, and CRM. One source of truth on the map; the people work happens where it works best.
Example
A south-east England bioregion network running 80+ active landowner participants across a single catchment uses Ecology App to maintain a live recruitment-curve map, generate funder-grade spatial annexes for landscape-recovery bids, and surface NDVI-driven change stories at catchment scale.