Every surface in Custodia, at the pace of the watershed.
A complete tour of how the system holds your stewardship work — from the weekly story to the grant report.
The land tells you what's happening.
NRI listens across iNaturalist, GBIF, USGS streamflow, NOAA weather, and your own field notes — then writes a quiet weekly paragraph that names what's actually unfolding. Not a chart. A sentence.
- Story mode for boards & funders, operational mode for staff
- Cached weekly so it loads instantly
- You can re-run it anytime
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.
Sites, parcels & watersheds, on a calm map.
Draw your sites by hand on a Mapbox canvas, import GeoJSON from your GIS, or geocode an address. Each site holds health scores, last-visited dates, assigned stewards, and the full project & survey history.
- Polygon and point geometry per site
- Health score that responds to surveys & observations
- Steward assignments with overdue alerts
Vegetation, soils, hydrology, habitat — documented properly.
Record vegetation communities as polygons. Place habitat features as points. Run repeating condition assessments. Soils auto-populate from USDA SSURGO the moment a site lands on the map.
- Auto-fetch SSURGO soil series, drainage class, hydric indicators
- Vegetation polygons & habitat point features
- Condition assessments over time, by surveyor
Every boundary, drawn on real ground.
Trace a parcel by hand or drop in a GeoJSON, and Custodia binds it to the actual landscape — soils, watershed, FEMA zone, neighboring uses — without you ever leaving the map.
- Hand-drawn polygons that snap to real geography
- Auto-context: soils, watershed, FEMA, hydrology
- Survey points layered on the same canvas
Volunteers, stewards & partners — a CRM that respects the work.
Skills, certifications with expiry alerts, hours given, availability. Track each person's relationship to your organization without making them feel like a row in a spreadsheet.
- Skill tags & certifications with renewal nudges
- Hours auto-aggregated from events & projects
- Public-facing stewardship event sign-ups via CROS
Approvals, the way easements actually work.
Custodia tracks every reserved right and discretionary approval written into the deed — and gives stewards a quiet inbox to review, decide, and record requests against them, with the full paper trail attached.
- Reserved-rights inventory keyed to the recorded deed
- Request → review → decide flow, with reasoning captured
- Audit-ready history per property and per right
A calm public face for each property.
Share a single property — its map, its acreage, its habitats — on your own website with one line of HTML. You decide field-by-field what to show, and the embed picks up your watercolor brand automatically.
- Per-field opt-in: map, acreage, habitat, steward credit
- Permanent share links that survive renames
- Watercolor styling that matches your site
custodia.app/embed/9b2f4a…d317Notice what's being proposed around the land.
Custodia watches public environmental review activity near your sites — EIS filings, permits, hearings, comment windows — and reads each one against bird migration windows, habitat sensitivity, and the stewardship memory you've already built. Routine filings stay quiet. The ones that matter rise on Watchtower.
- Nearby projects + open comment windows on Watchtower
- 12-month migration overlay per project
- Comment Prep Kit drawn from NRI + your past responses
- Searchable archive of every comment your org has filed
Transmission line re-route — 2.4 mi from Willow Creek
Comment window open · closes May 18 · overlaps spring migration
A dark-sky view of months of patient work.
Four contemplative canvases — Constellation, Atlas, Loom, and Field Notes — let you step back. Months of quiet stewardship arranged like stars across a dark sky.
- Constellation: every site & event as a point of light
- Loom: how projects, people, and species weave together
- Field Notes: the prose record of the season
Grant reports, written from real data.
Pull live numbers — habitat restored, hours given, species documented — straight into CSV and PDF exports built from the work you've already logged. No double entry.
- Templates for USFWS, NRCS, state & private funders
- PDF & CSV with your org branding
- Auto-cited back to the underlying records
LTA-ready, without the binder.
Custodia continuously assembles the evidence the Land Trust Accreditation Commission asks for — baselines, monitoring visits, approvals, reserved rights — into a single bundle you can hand a reviewer.
- Live coverage scores: baselines, plans, visits
- One-click PDF bundle aligned to LTA standards
- Open issues surfaced before the auditor finds them
Baselines, deeds, photos — properly filed.
Drop in a folder and Custodia classifies each file, links it to the right site, and marks the baseline-of-record. Live links to Google Drive and SharePoint stay fresh; snapshots freeze a copy when the audit needs one.
- Auto-classify deeds, baselines, plans, photos
- Baseline-of-record stamp per property
- Live links + on-demand frozen snapshots
Nature writing, woven in beside the work.
A curated shelf of public-domain nature writing — Thoreau, Leopold, Dillard, Krutch — surfaces alongside the habitats you steward. A small, quiet companion to the day's work.
- Public-domain texts, properly attributed
- Suggestions tuned to the habitat you're visiting
- Reflections you can pin to a site or a season
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…"
Story or operational — switch with a tap.
Story mode shows the weekly hero and the quiet narrative. Operational mode shows queues, overdue surveys, and what to do today. Both are one click apart.
- Hero card synthesises the past 7 days
- Quick stats: sites, species, hours
- Saved layouts per role
A seasonal letter from the land itself.
Four times a year, NRI composes a long-form letter in the voice of your preserves — what bloomed, who returned, what the water did. Send it to your members with one click; it doubles as your seasonal appeal.
- Equinox & solstice cadence, drafted from real signals
- Editable in plain prose before you send
- Member-ready email + printable PDF, both branded to your org
Dear members of Willow Creek,
The marsh wrens went quiet on the 14th. Three days later the first snow buntings arrived from the north — earlier than last year by a week. The beaver pond rose four inches after the rain on the 19th, and the skunk cabbage is already laying down next spring's leaves under the oaks…
What the watershed is trying to say this week.
A quiet feed of signals — a frog chorus picked up on a remote recorder, an unusual eBird checklist near the boundary, a streamflow drop, a soil moisture spike. Each entry comes with NRI's short reading of what it might mean.
- Aggregates eBird, iNaturalist, USGS, NOAA, and your sensors
- Gentle anomaly surfacing — no alarm fatigue
- One-tap 'send to field' for the steward on duty
- Wood frog chorus · Beaver Pond recorderMon 4:12amfirst of season
- eBird · 14 species in checklist near boundaryTue+1 unusual
- USGS gauge 04256000 dropped 0.4 ftWedstill above threshold
- iNaturalist · monarch egg count upThumilkweed plot 3
The patterns under the patterns.
Resonance scores how strongly each site's signals are humming this season — bird life, canopy, water, pollinators, volunteer presence — and shows where the work is taking root and where care needs to go next.
- Per-site resonance over time, by signal family
- Cross-site comparison without ranking or shame
- Honest read on where your stewardship is working
The few signals that should reach you, do.
Set thresholds for the things that actually matter — a fire perimeter within 10 miles, a streamflow below the trout-survival line, a species not seen this year. Watchtower listens, and only speaks when the threshold is crossed.
- FIRMS fire, USGS streamflow, GBIF re-sighting gaps
- Per-org severity rules — quiet by default
- Threshold campaigns can auto-launch a fundraising appeal
Stewardship that funds itself.
Sponsor-a-Preserve memberships, threshold campaigns tied to real ecological signals, and an annual print-on-demand Almanac shipped through Lulu. Stripe Connect deposits go straight to your org. 5% platform fee, $0 setup.
- Sponsor-a-Preserve recurring memberships per site
- Threshold campaigns: appeal when the watershed needs you
- Annual Almanac: a printed book of your stewardship year
- Funds land in your bank, not ours
The record that outlasts staff turnover.
Stewards leave. Boards turn over. Custodia keeps the institutional memory of every property — who knew it, what they decided, why it was done that way — and traces the lineage of every record back to its source. The next steward inherits more than a folder.
- Per-property memory timeline of decisions, visits, and conversations
- Lineage links every imported record back to its origin CSV or document
- Quiet handoff briefings when stewards rotate
- 2024Beaver dam at culvert · steward chose to leave itM. Reyes
- 2021First Henslow's sparrow heard since restorationL. Park
- 2018Easement amended to allow grazing on west fieldBoard
- 2009Property donated by the Whitfield familyFounding
A ledger of who shows up for the place.
Every workday, every gift, every letter from a member, every hour given — recorded as a relationship rather than a transaction. Reciprocity is the long memory of care: who has stood beside this land, and what the land owes them back.
- Hours, gifts, and acts of care held on one timeline per person
- Honors anonymous giving and unrecorded labor with equal weight
- Feeds the Annual Almanac's roll of stewards automatically
- Marian Reyes84 hrs · 6 yrs · monthly sponsor
- The Whitfield familyFounding gift · annual letter recipient
- Anonymous · Beaver Pond appeal$240 · drought threshold
- Eastside Bird Club47 checklists · spring counts
What should be happening this week.
The land has a calendar. Custodia keeps it — phenology entries, returning species, first frosts, peak bloom — and shows you each week what to expect alongside what's actually arriving. Drift between the two becomes legible.
- Per-preserve almanac of phenological events across the year
- Seeded from regional norms, refined by your own observations
- Folds into Wonder Letters and the printed Annual Almanac
- expectedWk 14Eastern phoebes typically return
- expectedWk 18Canopy begins to close
- this weekWk 22Mountain laurel typically blooms
- laterWk 35First fall warblers begin moving
An AI assistant that knows your land.
Ask Companion about a site, a season, a species, a steward — and it answers from your own records, not the open web. Grounded in your monitoring visits, your inventory, your Listening Room signals, your decisions.
- Reads only your org's data — no leakage, no hallucinated places
- Cites the underlying record on every answer
- Drafts visit prep, donor briefings, and board memos in your voice
Six new surfaces, each shaped to the work.
Field Mail, Follow-Through & Obligations Calendar, Instruments, Custodia Labs, The Commons, and the Indigenous Stewardship Tier. Built this season, all in the same calm key as the rest of the system.
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 clearly-marked lane for AI that isn't ready to be quiet yet.
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
We don't ask birders to log twice.
eBird and iNaturalist already hold the most thorough, daily-updated record of bird life near most preserves. Custodia interprets that data in stewardship context — what's nesting, what's moving through, what hasn't been seen this year.
- · Recent species and notable sightings within a configurable radius
- · The nearest community-recognized eBird hotspot
- · Photographic evidence pulled from iNaturalist
- · Optional public block on shared preserve pages
The block on the right is live data, refreshing for the most heavily-watched birding spot in North America.
What's flying through Central Park
Reported on eBird and iNaturalist within 5 km, last two weeks.
Data gathered by birders on eBird and iNaturalist. Custodia interprets — it never duplicates.
We don't ask arborists to inventory twice.
OpenTreeMap, municipal GIS, and USFS satellite canopy already hold the most thorough record of urban trees and cover. Custodia reads that data in stewardship context — what's growing, what's dominating, what shade is worth defending.
- · Public tree inventory species mix at any radius
- · USFS satellite canopy percentage at the parcel
- · i-Tree-style ecosystem benefit estimates (CO₂, stormwater, energy)
- · Optional public block on shared preserve pages
The block on the right is live, reading from PhillyTreeMap and the USFS National Land Cover Database.
What's growing around Center City Philadelphia
Public tree inventory and satellite canopy within 1.5 km.
Data gathered by arborists, municipalities, and USFS satellite mapping. Custodia interprets — it never duplicates.
Five voices in one calm block.
The Voices block composes birds, biodiversity, pollinators, trees, canopy, and (when configured) live streamflow into a single summary you can share on any preserve page.
The block on the right is live, sampled near Central Park.
What the land near Central Park is saying
Birders, naturalists, hydrologists, and arborists have been gathering data here. A glimpse:
eBird · iNaturalist · OpenTreeMap · USFS Canopy · USGS — Custodia interprets, never duplicates.
Plays well with the systems you already trust.
Custodia is the calm centre, not another walled garden. Bring your documents, your maps, your species records, and your funders along.
Google Drive & Dropbox
Live-link documents by default — Custodia keeps a fresh pointer to the source file. Snapshot import is one click away when you need a frozen copy for the audit trail.
NRI document sniffing
Drop a folder of baselines, MOUs, monitoring forms, or photos. NRI reads each file, classifies it, links it to the right site, and surfaces what looks important.
USDA SSURGO, iNaturalist, GBIF, USGS, NOAA
Soils auto-populate. Species observations stream in. Streamflow and weather context the weekly story. No API keys to manage.
Open API & webhooks
Every record is reachable through a clean REST surface. Send hours to your accounting system, push photos to your CMS, or build your own dashboards.
Easier to move into Custodia than to stay where you are.
Drop in your Landscape, LOCATE, or ConservationTrack export. Our import wizard recognises the columns, suggests the right Custodia fields, and keeps a per-row provenance link so you can roll back anything you don't like.
- One-click presets for Landscape, LOCATE, ConservationTrack
- CSV, GeoJSON, and Shapefile in the same flow
- Stage → review → approve → import, with a rollback per row
- Concierge migration included on Steward plans and above
sites.csv, visits.csv, and contacts.csv here.Ready to begin?
Create your organization in under a minute. Free for solo stewards.