Ecology App

How it started

Coming into land management after twenty years in engineering, the instinct was for a model before any earthworks. In engineering you rarely build anything that hasn't been modelled first — a digital twin. The same discipline applies on a hillside; the length scales just change.

We started with the obvious things: parcel boundaries, contours, drainage. Then ecosystem services — wetland creation, natural flood management, biodiversity net gain — and the consultants who help with each. Each piece of work was excellent in isolation, but it arrived in its own format: CAD drawings, photomaps, a LiDAR point cloud, an Excel workbook of soil carbon numbers. A neighbour had also done line-of-sight modelling for the historic parkland views. Eighteen months in, writing it all up into one report was the moment it clicked: this wasn't a documentation problem. It was a missing platform.

Conveniently, the underlying physics was familiar. The original PhD work was on computational thermodynamic modelling for advanced power generation — turbines, fuel cells, the kind of fluid flow that NASA and Rolls-Royce care about. Hydrology on a catchment turns out to be governed by the same conservation laws, just at hectares rather than square millimetres, and with a much smaller software budget.

So we built the tools ourselves. Most of the data is public — the Environment Agency publishes LiDAR, Natural England publishes habitat inventories, the British Geological Survey publishes geology and soils. We supplemented that with high-precision drone surveys and bespoke fieldwork. Once the models produced reliable results for our own farm, the obvious next step was to make the same workbench available to the consultancies, conservation organisations, and farm clusters facing the same friction.

And so Ecology App was born.