What is an Activity?

An Activity is a specific environmental action or task undertaken with a nature-based goal in mind, such as to achieve a measurable environmental benefit. In FieldDoc, Activities serve as the essential building blocks of a Portfolio, digitally representing real-world conservation, restoration, and nature-based projects. These activities are comprised of manageable, trackable, and reusable components, allowing users to monitor progress, report outcomes, and understand the direct impact of each action or investment.

FieldDoc provides a comprehensive list of over 300 nature-based Activity Types, which can be assigned to your Activities. This standardized categorization ensures precise reporting, analysis, and visualization of your work. Additionally, specific Activity Types can be linked to environmental models, connecting your work to industry-standard calculations for estimating environmental benefits. Standard categories also enable practitioners to share Activity data seamlessly with third parties, such as funders or aggregators, without duplicating records or undergoing complex data translation.

By using FieldDoc, users create a machine-readable Portfolio of their nature-based initiatives. The foundational Activity data within a Portfolio can be easily shared with funders, regulators, and partners from a single, centralized source.

Many users start in FieldDoc by sharing a subset of their organization’s work to meet grant compliance requirements, with the option to expand data management over time. FieldDoc facilitates standardized internal management and external data sharing, making it easier to track and showcase the full scope of environmental efforts.

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:

Type of Work: 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:

Single Creation
Batch Import
Link via Integrations