What is an Activity?

Activities in FieldDoc encompass a vast array of nature-based strategies intended to address environmental and societal goals. In Legacy FieldDoc, Activities were called Practices.

Examples of Activities include:

Conservation strategies, such as building wildlife corridors or placing conservation easements on parcels.
Restoration strategies, such as planting cover crops, installing bioretention rain gardens, and expanding urban tree canopies.
Sustainability strategies, such as conserving grasslands, managing forests, or protecting sensitive habitats.
Community engagement strategies, such as implementing monitoring programs, conducting educational series, or leading research initiatives

🌱 Check out the ESSENTIALS: Activities article to learn more about how to make your Nature-Based work into your most valuable digital asset.

Understanding Activity Data Sharing

There are strict data controls in place in FieldDoc to determine who can access an Activity Record to edit it and who can access an Activity record to collect metric information.

Activities reside in an organization's Activity Portfolio and by default, all users within an Organization have visibility of activity records.

Share with a Collaborator

If you want to share ownership of an Activity, you can give another FieldDoc user collaborator access. Collaborators added at the Activity level can only access the specific Activity. Collaborators can have read-only or full admin access. Collaborators at the activity level are often partners or technical service providers assisting you with data management for a specific section of your portfolio.

Share with a Funder, Investor, or Third Party

If you need to share an Activity record with a Third Party, you must create a Pact within that third party's Program. Any Activities linked in a Pact are fully shared with the Third Party. Often, these Third Parties collect critical activity data from on-the-ground practitioners to aggregate data across partners or track collective programmatic goals, such as for a funding program investing in nature-based solutions.

🌱 Check out ESSENTIALS: Pacts for details on how to configure this important data-sharing component.

🏦 Visit Find your Program Guidance for specific Funders that use FieldDoc to fulfill grant application and reporting compliance requirements.

Key Benefits of Activities

Foundational Element in FieldDoc
Activities are the foundation of FieldDoc, forming the building blocks of every portfolio. They standardize how actions are recorded, ensuring consistency, streamlined reporting, and reliable data across nature-based efforts of all sizes.
Build a Comprehensive Portfolio
Activities help you build a complete, organized portfolio of environmental work, offering both a historical record and a real-time view of progress. This allows for better assessment of progress, gap identification, and data-driven decision-making to maximize impact.
Standardized Structure for Analysis and Sharing
FieldDoc’s standardized framework simplifies internal analysis and external reporting, making collaboration easier. The uniform structure saves time and reduces errors when sharing data with partners, funders, or regulatory bodies.
Link Activities to Third Parties via Pacts
The Pacts feature allows you to associate Activities with funders, collaborators, or regulators, ensuring transparency and accountability. It simplifies communication and tracking by aligning Activities with specific obligations and agreements. One Activity can be shared with multiple Pacts, reducing data management and duplication concerns.
Track Metric Progress at the Activity Level
FieldDoc links Activities to specific metrics, allowing real-time tracking of environmental outcomes (e.g., sediment reduction, land restoration). This helps assess progress, identify trends, and generate data-backed reports for stakeholders.
Integrate with Analytical and Visualization Tools
Activities integrate with advanced tools for analyzing and visualizing data, providing deeper insights into project impacts. Visualization enables trend analysis, strategic decision-making, and more compelling reporting of successes to stakeholders.

Attributes of an Activity

Each activity typically includes:

Activity Type: The nature of the environmental intervention, such as planting trees, restoring wetlands, installing stormwater management systems, or monitoring water quality.
Location: Where the activity takes place, often tracked with geospatial data to provide precise mapping and visualization of the work.
Metrics: Measurable outcomes associated with the activity, such as the number of trees planted, the area of wetland restored, or the volume of pollutants reduced.
Timeline: The start and end dates, showing when the activity is planned and completed.
Associated Results: How the activity contributes to the overall environmental goals, such as improvements in water quality or habitat restoration.

The following detail the fields available within each tab of the Activity

Settings

Component	Description
Name	Give each Activity in your portfolio a unique, easily identifiable name. This is a text field.
Description	Provide any additional details about your Activity that you'd like to share. The description will be visible through all Pacts.
Activity Type	Select from the universal Activity Typeslist.
NEIEN	Map this Activity to NEIEN best management practice specifications. Align activity metadata and implementation measurements with Environmental Information Exchange Network specifications. This information enables implementation tracking and crediting by state governments and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Extent	FieldDoc calculates extent based on the dimensions (area, length, etc.) of an activity's geometry. Many models and activity types use this number to calculate estimated nutrient and sediment reductions and other parameters. FieldDoc uses the World Geodetic System (WGS84, EPSG:4326) as its reference coordinate system. Note that the estimated extent value generated by FieldDoc may differ from values produced by other systems that process geospatial data. If necessary, fill out the "User-defined extent" inputs below to override the FieldDoc-generated extent.
Completion Status	Track the completion status for this activity. Enter the date when the activity was fully installed by clicking the "Mark activity as completed" button. An activity is complete when all implementation work is finished. Note: The activity completion date is not generated by FieldDoc. It must be entered manually.
State Reporting	For use by users that are submitting their Activities to State Reporting Leads for crediting.
Inspection Log	For use by users that choose to demonstrate ongoing functionality of an installed Activity, or BMP.
Site	A mid-level organizing feature to add to multiple Activities.
Privacy	When the privacy setting is turn on, the activity can only be viewed and edited by project collaborators and program managers. Geographic data related to this activity will not appear on dashboard maps.

Geometry

Access the Map Editordirectly from each Activity to delineate an Activity footprint or make edits.

Metrics

Component	Description
Organization Metrics	Select Metrics to add from your organization's metric portfolio. Add the target when setting up your Activity and then track progress towards achieving the goal. Track progress towards implementation.
Programmatic Metrics	Select Metrics to add to your Activity from the list provided by the Program Opportunity Pact. Add the target when setting up your Activity and then track progress towards achieving the goal.

Models

Check out What are Models?for a thorough overview of Models and how to associate them with Activities. In each Activity, you will be able to view associated Models and, where appropriate, enter additional input fields.# What to do with your Activities

How are Activities used in FieldDoc

Activities are the central component of FieldDoc. There are a lot of ways that you can use the FieldDoc system to share, visualize, and scale use of your portfolio of Activities. Below is a short list of uses for this valuable information:

Share a subset of your Portfolio to Funders via Pacts
Share Activities to Third-Party Partners that aggregate nature-based initiatives for public disclosure
Report completed Activities to States for credit in their nature-based reporting processes
Make a public Atlas view to show stakeholders and partners the extent and impact of your work.
Use Integrations to build an ArcGIS Feature Service and Visualization with FieldDoc-managed data
Push data to existing Prioritization Tools.
Export Activity data to transform and report to non-state reporting entities.

Create an Activity

FieldDoc offers many pathways to add Activities to your Portfolio. Choose your own adventure!

Choose a pathway to add your Activities

We have opened up FieldDoc to make it easy for you to add Activities from multiple pathways. While this should help you navigate the system with ease once you are familiar with your options, it makes training new users a little bit tricky. Below, we lay out five pathways for how to add your Activities.

Let's do it!

For tutorials on how to add Activities to your Portfolio, head to Create your Activities. You have options to:

Individual Activity Creation
Batch Import
Link via Integrations