The ecological intelligence system for stewardship.
Custodia brings together sites, stewardship work, species observations, volunteers, and ecological signals in one calm workspace — then helps conservation teams see what is changing across the land.
A living system for careful people who tend the land.
Custodia helps you care for land, read its signals, and notice what is being proposed around it.
A short film
More time in the field.
Sixty seconds on the full Custodia offering — voices, review watch, reporting studio, file intelligence, and readiness — built around the rhythms of land trusts and the people who tend the land.
Tap fullscreen for the full picture.
Where are you starting from?
Some land trusts already have core operations running and just want to expand what they can do. Others need a new tool, or are ready to migrate. Custodia meets you on either road.
Add the tools the field actually needs.
Keep your existing CRM and operations. Layer Custodia alongside them for fundraising tools, ecological inventories, audio voices, accreditation reports, and the almanac your current stack doesn't cover.
- Five fundraising tools, including Wonder Prints
- Voices of This Place — birds, trees, community
- Review Watch — nearby environmental review, in context
- Reporting Studio — monitoring, accreditation, grant & board reports
- Wonder feed and seasonal Almanac
Make Custodia your home.
Whether you're moving off an older system or you're a young conservation group with nothing yet, Custodia gives you a single contemplative home for sites, people, fundraising, and the land itself.
- Guided import from legacy CRMs and spreadsheets
- Sites, parcels, projects, volunteers — held together
- Pulse, NRI, Review Watch & Reporting Studio — fully integrated
- A gentle on-ramp for first-time stewards
Place
Sites, parcels, watersheds — held together with map and memory.
People
Volunteers, stewards, partners. Skills, certifications, hours given.
Pulse
A dark-sky dashboard that turns months of work into constellations.
More than recordkeeping.
Traditional conservation software stores records, maps properties, and tracks visits. Custodia does that too — but it also listens for ecological signals, preserves stewardship memory, and helps your team understand what matters now and what deserves attention next.
- 01
Stewardship records
Sites, parcels, visits, approvals, volunteers, projects, and reports — all held in one system.
- 02
Ecological voices
Birds, trees, biodiversity, water, and pollinators — gathered into a living picture of place.
- 03
NRI interpretation
A disciplined narrative layer that distinguishes witness, memory, and what may be coming.
- 04
Environmental Review Watch
See nearby review activity, connect it to bird migration, habitat, and water context, and bring local stewardship memory into the conversation.
- 05
Reporting Studio
Turn field visits, ecological signals, and stewardship memory into report-ready monitoring, accreditation, grant, board, and impact reports.
- 06
Public meaning
Field Notes, public embeds, wonder letters, and donor-ready storytelling that help others care.
Listening. Anticipating. Responding. Deciding.
Stewardship unfolds in rhythms. Custodia gives your team four clear modes of attention: listening to the land, reading the season, recording reciprocal care, and responding only when something truly needs action.
- 01 · Listening
Voices & Watchtower
Custodia continuously gathers signals from eBird, iNaturalist, GBIF, USGS, NOAA, and FIRMS across the places you steward — so your team sees what is changing before anyone has to ask.
- 02 · Anticipating
Almanac
What should be happening this week — phenology, returning species, first frosts — held against what actually is observed. The land's calendar, kept honestly.
- 03 · Responding
Reciprocity
Every gift, every workday, every letter recorded as a relationship rather than a transaction — a clear ledger of who shows up for the place, and how often.
- 04 · Deciding
Thresholds
Set the ecological lines that matter — baseflow, fire perimeter, a missing species — and Custodia speaks only when one is actually crossed. Quiet by default.
And then the loop turns again — next week, next season, next decade.
More time in the field.
Custodia reduces the administrative work that pulls conservation teams away from the places they care for — from report prep to file chasing to year-end scramble.
- Annual monitoring & reporting→Field activity becomes report-ready drafts
- Environmental review surprises→Nearby review activity flagged and interpreted
- Drive & Dropbox file chaos→Existing records organized into preserve-level context
- Accreditation scramble→Missing records surfaced before review season
- Board & grant updates→Summaries generated from work already documented
- Full migration anxiety→Companion Mode works with the systems you already use
The land has been speaking.
Custodia is finally listening.
Birders, naturalists, hydrologists, arborists, and community scientists have already been gathering rich ecological data around the places you steward. Custodia brings those signals together — from birds, trees, biodiversity, water, and pollinators — and interprets them as witness, memory, and what may deserve attention next.
- BirdsMigration, richness, activity, return
- TreesCanopy, species, resilience, shade
- BiodiversityLife beyond the visible summary
- WaterFlow, season, drought, stress
- PollinatorsHabitat, flowering, fragility, return
We don't ask the field to start over. Custodia interprets, never duplicates.
Watchtower now surfaces nearby environmental review activity alongside birds, water, and seasonal change — flagging when proposed activity overlaps with migration windows, habitat sensitivity, or long-held stewardship concerns.
See what is being proposed around the places you care for.
Environmental review activity often moves in technical language and distant systems. Custodia brings it back into the life of place — connecting public review records with bird migration, water sensitivity, habitat context, and the stewardship memory your organization already holds.
Nearby review activity
See environmental review projects, comment windows, and linked documents near your preserves and watersheds.
Bird migration & seasonal sensitivity
Understand when proposed activity overlaps with migratory bird movement and other sensitive ecological windows.
Stewardship memory
Bring long-held local knowledge, recurring concerns, and restoration history into the review process.
NRI interpretation
Distinguish what appears routine, what may matter, and what deserves closer attention.
Watch not only the land itself, but the decisions gathering around it.
From field visit to finished report.
Custodia turns stewardship activity into usable reports — from annual monitoring and accreditation support to grant narratives, board briefs, and annual impact reporting.
The same records that guide care can also help you prove, explain, and communicate the work.
Annual monitoring reports
Conservation easement monitoring drawn from visits, photos, and findings already on file.
Accreditation support
Evidence packets that assemble themselves from the stewardship record, not the week before review.
Grant and board reporting
Narrative drafts grounded in the work you've already documented — not a fresh write-up each cycle.
Annual impact and storytelling
A public-facing year in stewardship for the board, donors, and the wider circle.
Turn stewardship activity into report-ready evidence.
A weekly synthesis grounded in the life of your sites.
NRI turns stewardship records, species observations, ecological signals, and recent field activity into a concise weekly synthesis. It helps your team see what changed, what matters, and what may deserve attention next.
- Grounds interpretation in stewardship records and ecological signals
- Distinguishes the meaningful from the routine
- Switch between story mode and operational mode at any time
The marsh is breathing again.
Spring peepers returned to the south pool on Tuesday. Maria and a group of seven cleared invasive cattail along the east edge — slow, careful work. The first sedge wren of the season was heard at dawn Friday near the cottonwoods.
Every parcel, every visit, every steward — on one calm map.
Draw your sites by hand or import from GIS. Each site holds its own health score, last-visited date, assigned stewards, and the full history of projects, surveys, and observations that have unfolded there.
Every preserve becomes a living record — not just of acreage and boundaries, but of change, memory, and care.
Vegetation, soils, hydrology — documented with care.
Track vegetation communities, habitat features, and condition assessments over time. Soil data auto-fetches from USDA SSURGO the moment you place a site on the map. Nothing to hand-enter twice.
A dark-sky view of the whole stewardship system.
Four contemplative canvases — Constellation, Atlas, Loom, and Field Notes — let you step back and see months of patient work arranged like stars.
Step back from daily tasks and see months of stewardship arranged as pattern, signal, and return.
The deed remembered. The decision recorded.
Track every reserved right written into the easement, and route permission requests — fence rebuilds, educational visits, timber harvests — through a calm approve / under-review / deny workflow that becomes part of the property's permanent record.
custodia.app/embed/9b2f4a…d317Open a quiet window onto the land — for anyone.
Per-site, opt-in. Toggle exactly what visitors see — map, acreage, habitat, the steward's name. Drop the iframe into your board page, your funder's site, your kids' classroom. Rotate the link any time.
Accreditation, generated from the work itself.
One click rolls every site, baseline, monitoring visit, reserved right, and approval decision into a multi-page bundle that maps cleanly onto Land Trust Accreditation Commission requirements. Archived, signed, ready to send.
Bring decades of records over without the dread.
Built-in presets read Landscape, LOCATE, ConservationTrack, and generic spreadsheets. Custodia auto-maps the columns it recognizes, surfaces the rows that need a human eye, and stages everything for review before a single record is imported.
Six more rooms in the same quiet house.
A glance at the corners of Custodia you may not have seen yet.
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…"
Your sent mail, read for stewardship signal.
Connect Gmail and Custodia quietly scans your sent messages for the things that matter to the work — a new landowner contact, a thread that belongs in a preserve's record, a 'I'll get back to you next week' that should become a follow-up. Nothing is ever saved without your accept. It is never an inbox.
- Per-user OAuth, sent-only by default — opt in to inbox separately
- AI bundles related messages: 'Three threads with the Maple Ridge landowner'
- Suggests contacts, timeline entries, follow-up tasks, preserve links
- Disconnect wipes tokens and any unaccepted bundles
Tasks and obligations on one quiet calendar.
Annual monitoring visits, fee inspections, board packets, accreditation prep — Custodia already knows the recurring spine. Tasks are the ad-hoc layer above it. Both render onto one month-and-week calendar, color-coded by readiness, never by who's behind.
- Recurring obligations auto-project as task instances inside their lead window
- Tasks link to preserves, projects, contacts, visits, reports — not flat checklists
- Calendar in month and week views with a per-preserve schedule tab
- 'My week' widget on the dashboard — five next items, never a red badge
The ingestion layer for the tools in the field.
Custodia is not a device platform — it is the place the data finally lands. Drop in an iNaturalist export, a Wildlife Insights camera-trap CSV, a HOBO water-quality file, a BirdNET acoustic summary, or a Survey123 GeoJSON. Custodia parses each format, normalizes it into a single observation table, and surfaces the signal in NRI.
- iNaturalist · Wildlife Insights · HOBO · BirdNET · Survey123 supported in v1
- One normalized observations table — taxon, count, metric, value, location
- Companion mode: signals attach to org level when there are no preserves yet
- Full mode: observations link to sites and feed monitoring + briefs
- iNaturalist export412 obsingested
- Wildlife Insights · cam-trap-031,840 detectionslinked to Beaver Pond
- HOBO water logger · WC-230 daysnormalized
- BirdNET nightly summary27 speciesingested
A CRM that understands the relationships behind the work.
Land trust work is relational before it is transactional. Custodia's CRM keeps people, partner organizations, landowners, agency contacts, donors, and volunteers in one quiet record — alongside the preserves they care for, the projects they're part of, and the conversations you've had. Threaded mentions, role tags, and timelines, not pipelines and dashboards.
- People, partners, landowners, agencies — all on one shape, none of them second class
- Per-contact timeline of visits, letters, emails (via Field Mail), and project links
- Role-aware: who shows up where, how often, and what they care about
- @-mentions in field notes wire activity back into each contact's record
- Apr 12 · email"Will be away through May — fine for monitoring after the 25th."
- Mar 03 · visitAnnual monitoring · ATV track noted at NE corner
- Feb 14 · letterAnnual letter · acknowledged restoration around the seep
The aligned events and grants, surfaced not searched.
A small steward's office should not have to monitor twelve newsletters to know what's happening. Custodia watches federal and state grant programs, regional foundations, conservation conferences, and habitat-aligned community events — and surfaces what matches your sites, your species, your geography, and your stage of work.
- Grants Finder — federal · state · regional · habitat-aligned, with deadlines on your calendar
- Events Finder — conferences, trainings, community science days near your preserves
- Match scoring against your habitat types, species lists, and current projects
- One-click → draft a grant outline or add an event to the obligations calendar
- USFWS · Partners for Fish and Wildlifestrong matchRiparian restoration · matches Willow Creek · due Jun 15
- State DEQ · Watershed StewardshipprobableWater quality monitoring · matches HOBO ingest · due Jul 1
- Open Space Institute · CapacityconsiderOperating support · regional · rolling
A clearly-marked lane for experimental AI.
Labs is where Custodia tries new AI before it earns a place in the rest of the system. Auto-tag a field photo for habitat, possible species, possible issues. Every output carries a confidence label. Every output is reviewable, dismissible, and never auto-attached to records that carry legal or accreditation weight.
- Org admin opts in; each user acknowledges experimental terms
- Confidence pills: low · probable · high — below 'high' requires explicit insert
- Per-output feedback (✓ correct · ✗ incorrect · ? uncertain · ★ useful) trains the loop
- Audit log of every AI suggestion and reviewer decision
- habitatwet meadow · willow fringehigh✓ correct·✗ incorrect·★ useful
- speciespossible: red-winged blackbirdprobable✓ correct·✗ incorrect·★ useful
- issueATV track at edgelow✓ correct·✗ incorrect·★ useful
Templates, shared by the practitioners who wrote them.
Monitoring forms, baseline checklists, landowner letters, board reports — the things every land trust has had to invent twice. Publish yours to The Commons, fork what others have done well, change what you need, contribute back. Versioned, attributed, fork-able. Free for every tier.
- Three visibility levels: private · my org · The Commons
- Fork into your org with a single click; version history travels with it
- Light reactions — thanks · used · reported — instead of a feed
- Sovereignty-mode orgs are auto-excluded from cross-org aggregation
- monitoring·commonsAnnual conservation easement monitoring formCatskill Center · v3↪ 14 forks
- letter·commonsLandowner first-visit introductionPiedmont Land Conservancy · v2↪ 31 forks
- checklist·commonsBaseline documentation pre-flightWillow Creek Trust · v1↪ 6 forks
A small contribution toward keeping the tools accessible.
Custodia is built on stewardship traditions that long predate land trusts. Federally and state-recognized tribal governments, tribal natural resource departments, Indigenous-led land conservancies, and intertribal collaborations apply once and receive the full system — Labs, Commons, Instruments — at no cost, indefinitely, with sovereignty mode on by default.
- Application reviewed by the Custodia team within five business days
- Sovereignty mode: org data excluded from cross-org aggregation and AI training signals
- Federation and published-essays opt-out by default; export-everything always available
- Tier is private to the org — no badge anywhere user-facing unless you choose
Custodia works with the files you already have.
Many land trusts and conservation groups already keep critical records in Dropbox, Drive, and shared folders. Custodia helps turn those scattered files into organized preserve records, reporting inputs, and readiness workflows.
Keep your current file systems. Let Custodia make them useful.
- Map cloud files to preserves and easements
- Pull evidence into reports
- Surface missing critical documents
- Support accreditation and stewardship readiness
Bring your documents, maps, and species records along.
Bring your records over — or keep your current system and add Custodia's intelligence layer.
Custodia supports both full migration and companion use. Import decades of stewardship history when you are ready, or connect the records you already maintain elsewhere and let Custodia add Voices, NRI, and a richer sense of what your land is saying.
- Ecological Voices across birds, water, canopy, pollinators, and biodiversity
- Narrative Relational Intelligence that interprets change across time
- Field Notes and public storytelling built into the product
- USDA SSURGO auto-soils and live ecological enrichment
- Free tier for solo stewards and small organizations
And now your stewardship can fund itself.
The same field journal that proves your work to a regulator is the one that moves a sponsor to give. Custodia turns it into three quiet rails: monthly Sponsor-a-Preserve memberships, Threshold campaigns tied to real ecological signals, and a printed Annual Almanac drawn from the year's letters from the land. Stripe Connect handles payouts directly to your organization. Custodia keeps a small 5% platform fee on funds raised through these rails — no setup fees, no monthly minimums.
- A public sponsor page for every preserve you steward
- Threshold campaigns open when a real signal crosses a line
- An Annual Almanac printed on demand and shipped
Letters from the preserve, the Annual Almanac, and a workday invitation each season.
The year's Wonder Letters, hand-bound. Print on demand via Lulu — no inventory, no risk.
Custodia can lower costs and help your stewardship pay for itself.
Not a sales gimmick. An honest look at the hidden economics of stewardship software — what your current stack may be costing, what support opportunities are quietly going unasked, and what Custodia can put back in your pocket.
A lighter stack — fewer add-ons, fewer adjacent subscriptions, less staff time spent translating fieldwork into donor language.
Sponsor-a-Preserve, threshold campaigns, and the Annual Almanac — included rails that turn places into recurring support.
The same record that proves the work makes the case for it — quietly, in public, in the voice of the land.
Illustrative ranges, not guarantees. Custodia is not a donor CRM — it runs alongside whatever donor system you already use.
Designed for the people who hold places together.
Custodia is built for land trusts, watershed groups, habitat restoration teams, urban conservation projects, and small organizations carrying large responsibilities.
- Land trustsFrom accreditation-bound regional trusts to small all-volunteer chapters.
- Watershed groupsFor teams holding rivers, riparian corridors, and watershed-wide stewardship together.
- Habitat restoration teamsPlantings, removals, monitoring, and the long arc of recovery, kept honestly.
- Community conservationUrban preserves, neighborhood groups, friends-of organizations.
- Small stewardship nonprofitsLean teams carrying large responsibilities — Custodia carries the weight beside you.
Begin the rhythm of careful attention.
Start free, connect your current tools, or bring your whole stewardship system into Custodia.