1Step outside
Notice it.
A flash of blue on a stem. A bird call you don’t recognise. The same toadstool you saw last October. Point your phone.
A field guide for your patch
Notice what’s growing around you.
Wild Acre is a quiet companion for the garden, the hedgerow and the back field. Photograph what you spot, let us name it, and watch your land change over the seasons.
Photograph it
A name for the thing on the hawthorn.
Point the camera at a butterfly, a beetle, a fern you don’t recognise. We’ll suggest a shortlist — in plain language, with the Latin name underneath, and you decide what to record.
- It guesses, you confirm. Never overconfident — if we’re unsure we say so.
- Birds by ear, too. Tap to listen — it’ll pick out species from a dawn chorus.
- Better in your patch. The shortlist learns what’s likely on a Devon hedgerow vs a Surrey garden.
Map your patch
A quiet record of what lives where.
Every sighting becomes a dot on your land. Filter by birds, insects, plants — or by month, to see what’s returning and what’s gone. The kind of thing a good gamekeeper used to keep in a notebook.
- One patch, all your findings. Sketch the field boundary or pull it from the Ordnance Survey.
- Where things really were. Coordinates stay on your device. Shared sightings only show a rough area.
- Time-travel your land. Scrub through the seasons to see how the patch changes.
How it works
Three steps. Most of it happens outside.
Wild Acre stays out of your way. The app is the bit between noticing something and remembering it.
2Photograph it
Name it.
We suggest a species — confidently if we’re sure, gently if we’re not. You confirm, or you say “actually it’s this”.
3Build a record
Keep it.
It lands in your journal and on your map. Over a year, a small library of what lives where, and when. Yours, unless you share it.
Your journal
A year on the patch, in your pocket.
Everything you record becomes a chronological field journal — today, yesterday, earlier this week, last October. Photographs, notes, the conditions of the morning. Export the whole thing as a PDF when you’re ready to share it with someone.
- Group by day, species, or place. Find that toadstool from last autumn in two taps.
- Weather, attached. Each entry remembers what the morning was doing.
- Export to PDF. Print it, post it, hand it to the next generation of stewards.
Run a project
Run a biodiversity project people actually stick with.
Sketch the area, choose what you’re counting, and invite your group. Everyone records on their own phone — and because each person keeps their own journal and map, they can see exactly what they’ve added. That sense of ownership is what keeps them coming back.
Up and running in an afternoon
Draw the boundary, pick the species you care about, and your project is live. No spreadsheets, no setup calls, no kit to hand out.
Buy-in that lasts
Each participant gets their own field journal and map. Watching their own list grow is what turns a one-off survey day into a habit.
All the data, one place
Verified sightings roll into a single shared map you can filter, export, and hand to a funder, a trust, or the next season’s volunteers.
A morning on the patch
What yesterday looked like.
A typical Tuesday for a Wild Acre user with a half-acre of garden, an old orchard and a brook running along the south boundary. Eight findings, twenty minutes, mostly before breakfast.
Wood pigeon
Common blue
Hawthorn
Speckled wood
Small ground beetle
Hart’s tongue fern
From the field
I’ve been keeping a paper notebook since 1998. Wild Acre is the first thing I’ve used that didn’t feel like a step down from it.
Erin Tierney
Beekeeper · West Cork · 117 acres
Step outside
The dawn chorus is in.
Wild Acre is free to use on your own patch — forever. Project subscriptions support the conservation trusts running them.
Available on iOS 16 and Android 12 or later.