Mapping & planning
EcoIntel builds every map layer of your farm and puts them in one place. The same layers that show you the land also score its health. No GIS skills, no downloading data, no stitching tools together. Every map on this page is our own demonstration farm, Wilder Wood.
01 · One place
Most of what shapes a farm sits below what you can see from the gate: how water moves, where the ground stays cold and wet, which slopes shed and which collect, how each field has recovered year on year. EcoIntel maps all of it from satellite and public elevation data, styles it, and shows it on one screen. You open a field and read it.
Two products bring the layers together:
02 · The terrain
Terrain does not change from year to year, so it is the base you read every other layer against. EcoIntel builds it from public 2 m elevation data.
Winter hillshade
The shape of the land under a low winter sun. It shows which slopes face the sun and which stay in shade. Deep winter shade marks cold, slow-to-warm ground; south-facing slopes warm first.
Summer hillshade
The same relief under a high summer sun. Read the two together and you see how light and shade move across the year.
Aspect
Which way each part of each field faces. South-facing ground greens up earlier and dries faster; north-facing ground stays cooler and moister and starts later.
Slope
How steep each patch of ground is, at 10 m. Steep ground sheds water and is harder to work; gentle ground holds it.
Contours at 2 m
Height lines every 2 m. The reference for setting a track, fence, water line or tree row on the level.
03 · Water
From the same elevation data EcoIntel works out how water moves across the farm, before you ever walk it in the rain.
Topographic Wetness Index
Where water gathers and where it sheds, worked out from the shape of the ground. Blue collects and soaks in; cream drains away. The wet lines pick out valleys and keyline zones.
Valley network
The natural drainage lines. Where ponds, buffers and tree planting tend to pay back most.
Keyline zones
Four bands from ridge to valley that share the same water and temperature behaviour. A pattern for planning where water moves.
Pond suitability
Where a pond or dam would sit best, ranked from the terrain and the wetness.
And more: fifteen-plus map layers in the Atlas, sixty-plus signals across the system. See them all.
04 · Land health, read over time
The same satellite record that draws the maps scores each field. EcoIntel reads greenness and structure week by week, weather-corrects it, and turns it into a Land Health Score from 1 to 9 and the four ecosystem processes, back to 2018.
05 · What was done, week by week
A step drop in the Sentinel-1 radar signal marks a likely grazing or mowing event. EcoIntel logs them week by week and measures how many weeks each field takes to recover its biomass afterwards. Hay cuts and grazing look similar from space, so you confirm what was done; the timing comes from the satellite.
06 · What makes it different
You could pull elevation data, run hillshade and wetness in QGIS, load Sentinel imagery in Google Earth, then reproject and style each layer by hand. That takes GIS skills and hours per farm. EcoIntel does all of it for you and keeps it current, so you spend your time reading the land instead of preparing it.
Other farm maps draw the land and stop there. EcoIntel reads the same layers to score each field on the four ecosystem processes and to give it a Land Health Score from 1 to 9. The map you browse for planning and the diagnosis you act on run on one set of layers.
07 · A worked example
What if, for every field and parcel on your farm, you had its aspect, its winter and summer shade fractions, its slope and its Topographic Wetness Index, the week it starts growing and the week it peaks, radar detection of every grazing and mowing event and the recovery time that followed, and its water and energy cycles quarter by quarter, all read from satellite and elevation data and ready the moment you open the map, to build the grazing plan that works for the cattle and for the ecosystem? EcoIntel reads all of it for you, for every field, at once.
That is exactly what the report's Field Seasonal Profile does. Here is how it works on Wilder Wood.
Start with the ground that does not change. The winter hillshade and the aspect layer show which fields face north and sit in shade and which face south and catch the sun. The Topographic Wetness Index shows which hold water and which drain. A north-facing, shaded, wet field is the cold, slow-to-warm one; a south-facing, dry field warms and grows first.
Now add time. For every field, EcoIntel reads the week it starts growing in spring, the week its biomass peaks, and how long its season runs. It ranks the fields by green-up, so the earliest south-facing fields are ready for the first spring graze, and the cold shaded fields are the ones that need to wait and need the longest rest.
Then it reads what happened. EcoIntel picks up grazing and mowing from radar and measures how many weeks each field took to recover afterwards. When a cold, slow-to-warm field is grazed early and then peaks late or recovers slowly, that is the sign it was grazed before it was ready, and its growth stayed low for the rest of the season. On Wilder Wood the report says it plainly for a real field: an east-facing field on cooler ridge ground greens up in the second half of the spring window, and grazing it too early costs energy capture for the rest of the year.
It becomes a turnout order. Start the spring rotation on the early south-facing fields, hold the cold shaded ones for later and give them the longest rest, and move stock to the wetter, cooler fields when the free-draining ground dries out in summer. The report flags a field grazed too often for its recovery. You and your advisor make the turnout call and confirm what happened on the ground; EcoIntel supplies the readiness order, the recovery times and the reasoning.
The quickest way to understand this is to open it on our Wilder Wood Farm demo, no card needed.
Read more: Stack the map layers to understand your land · Capabilities · Visual Property Atlas · The Land Health System
