EarthCape

About

Built for our customers, released to everyone

EarthCape Oy has built collection and monitoring systems for natural history institutions since 2011. Herbaria, national museums, botanic gardens, and long-term monitoring programmes.

The mobile app is part of that work. We decided to release it to everyone rather than only to our customers, and that meant making it stand completely on its own: no account, no server behind it, and every function working with no signal.

What it carries is what the institutional side carries. The same data model, the same protocols, the same export formats. Nothing was cut down on the way out.

Why it matters later

Field data earns its value later

A survey is worth most on the day it can be set beside another one: the next site, the next season, the next decade. What makes that possible is that both records were shaped the same way. Nobody plans for a format to drift. It drifts anyway, because the notes that explain it stay with the person who wrote them, and people move on to other projects.

What comparison needs

  • Across sitesTwo transects only compare if both recorded what was looked for, not only what was found.
  • Across seasonsEffort and duration are what turn a species list into a trend.
  • Across teamsA shared vocabulary is what lets a second observer’s records sit beside the first’s.
  • Across decadesThe hardest data to recover is the data whose format was never written down.

Who builds it

A Helsinki company that builds biodiversity databases

EarthCape Oy has built collection and monitoring systems for natural history institutions since 2011. Herbaria, national museums, botanic gardens and long-term monitoring programmes run their data on our platform. Some of them hold collections. Some of them run nothing but surveys.

That second group is why this app exists in the form it does. A monitoring programme has no specimens to fall back on. All it has is the record made in the field, and whether that record can still be read in twenty years.

earthcape.com
  • Royal Botanic Gardens, KewUnited Kingdom · Integrated Collection Management System
  • Meise Botanic GardenBelgium · coordinator of DiSSCo Flanders
  • Musée national d’histoire naturelleLuxembourg
  • Luxembourg Institute of Science and TechnologyLuxembourg · monitoring surveys
  • Real Jardín Botánico de MadridSpain · CSIC
  • National Botanic Gardens, GlasnevinIreland
  • University of HelsinkiFinland · Åland long-term survey
  • World Forest IDInternational · global timber reference collection

“This is an ambitious project which aims to bring all of our collections data into one integrated system. A new software system (‘Earthcape’) has been purchased, and work is continuing on transition of our various sets of data into the new system.”

How it fits together

One record, from the field to GBIF

Records made in the app are already in the shape the next step expects, so nothing has to be translated on the way. This is the path institutions pay to build. If you are working on your own, you use the first box and export straight out of it — nothing about the app depends on the rest of it existing.

The app Observations, tracks and photos, recorded against a protocol, offline. You are here
The platform The institution’s database. Curation, permissions, reporting.
The collection Specimens, storage, loans and accessioning in the herbarium or museum.
GBIF Published as Darwin Core, where anyone can find and cite it.
On your own? Export straight out of the app in any of twelve formats — Darwin Core Archive, GeoPackage, GeoJSON, Shapefile and eight more. The records are yours, and they leave in a format a museum or a repository already reads.

Whose format is it

We didn’t invent a format

The biodiversity community spent years agreeing how to describe an occurrence, a survey and the effort behind it. Those agreements already exist, they are public, and they are what the app writes. Nothing here is ours to claim.

The practical effect is that a record leaves the app already saying what it is, in terms a museum, a monitoring agency and a repository all read the same way.

We are not finished. Humboldt coverage is fifteen terms today and there are more worth carrying, and the archive is written around occurrences where it should be written around events. Both are on the list. We would rather tell you where the edges are than let you find them.

Read the documentation

In the build you can install today

  • Darwin CoreThe vocabulary the whole field shares. Export a Darwin Core Archive straight from the app.
  • Darwin Core Data PackageThe newer relational packaging. Events, occurrences, material and media in linked tables rather than one flat sheet.
  • Fifteen Humboldt termsProtocol, effort and duration, area covered, habitat and taxonomic scope, absence, site count and weather — carried with the archive.
  • Ten other formatsGeoPackage, Shapefile, GeoJSON, GPX and six more, for everything that is not Darwin Core.

Why it is free

It costs us nothing, and it saves us a great deal

The app works offline, has no accounts and no servers behind it, so a second user costs us nothing. Keeping it inside institutional contracts would have put it in the hands of a few hundred people. There was no good reason to do that.

There is a plainer reason too. Records that arrive already in a shared shape are records nobody has to translate. That is worth more to us than a fee would be, and it is the whole of our interest here. We would rather say so than have you wonder.

What that means for your data

  • Nothing leaves the deviceRecords, photos and tracks stay in local storage until you export them.
  • No advertising, no resaleThe app is funded by neither, and your records are not a product.
  • Twelve export formatsYour data is not held hostage by the app that recorded it.
  • No account to makeThere is nothing to sign up for and nothing to cancel.

What professional means here

The same data model that runs a herbarium

Every claim on this page is checkable against the build in the store. There is no separate, better version of the app that institutions get.

What an institution runs on top of it is the rest of the chain: curation, permissions, reporting, loans. The recording end is the app you install, and it is complete.

In the build you can install today

  • The same data modelObservations, specimens, localities and taxonomy are shaped the way the institutional system shapes them, so records survive the trip into a real collection.
  • Protocols, not a notes fieldThe built-in survey protocols come from work with ecologists running actual programmes.
  • Offline firstMark the area you are working in and its topographic detail comes with you, because fieldwork happens where there is no signal.
  • Standards, not an in-house formatDarwin Core Archive, GeoPackage and ten more.

Getting in touch

Questions are welcome

If something here does not match what you find in the app, we would rather hear about it than not.

  • For your own fieldworkThe documentation covers every screen. Support is at earthcape.app/support.
  • For an institutionearthcape.com, or info@earthcape.com.
  • Where we areEarthCape Oy, Latokartanonkaari 3, 00790 Helsinki, Finland.

The other end of the chain

Digitising the collection at Kew

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew runs EarthCape over its collections. This is the work a field record travels into.

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Film by Visual Air.