Field Entry {e.folio}
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A working record of putting one small tract above the Lampasas River back toward what the Hill Country can be — its seven sections, the instruments we build to tend them and every plan and line of code we use to do it.
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None of this is a story about neglect. The land was farmed and grazed by people who worked it hard and followed the best advice available at the time. What we inherited is the honest result of those decisions, plus twenty years of a grass doing exactly what it was planted to do.
Boundaries are managerial, not legal; acreages are as recorded in the plan of record. Care classes run riparian & hydrologic, woody & shelter, and agricultural.
The flood plate is adapted from the Lampasas CAD web map and is informational only — never use it for an insurance determination. The same atlas drives the maps in our manuals and the open GeoJSON under Instruments & Infrastructure.
Two ways of watching the same ground. The aerial record is every federal and state survey flight over the tract since 1981 — one pass every few years, sharp enough to see fence lines. The satellite record is this year, a usable frame every week or two. Drag the sliders and the place changes under you: forty years of working ground on the left, one season of restoration on the right.
Left: survey flights by USDA (NAIP), Texas (TOP) and USGS (NHAP); the early frames are color-infrared — red is growing vegetation — and 1996 is black and white. Right: Sentinel-2, ten-meter pixels smoothed for the eye — a pulse, not a photograph; the pale ring in the last frames is the first burndown coming through. The bone line is the tract.
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Existing
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Intended
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Each condition is answered somewhere in the plan of record — section by section, in a deliberate order. The sequence and the seven sections are on
Nothing here is a finding against the people who farmed this ground. It is a starting inventory, written down so the work can be measured against it.
Plate {num}·A — Existing
Plate {num}·B — Intended
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The bench is built, and its controller software is feature-complete and verified in simulation — bringing it up on the unit’s own Piconium is the work underway now. Its live board — bench status, reservoir level, per-bay moisture and temperature — will publish here once the controller is on the bench and its API is online. Until it does, this page shows no readings: we would rather show nothing than dress the sheet with placeholder numbers. The build itself is documented in
These are the species we are focusing on for the restoration — the woody trees, shrubs and vines we grow on the propagation bench, plus the PUB grass-and-forb drill mix. The list is long, but it is not exhaustive; it is a working set, not the whole flora of the tract. Each opens as its own plate — for the woody species, the full propagation profile from our manual — and we’re reconciling every note against NPSOT and USDA before it hardens.
No species match “{q}” — try a common name like “bluestem” or a genus like “Quercus.”
}Short’s Resort Field Station (SRFS) is the public face of a land restoration on a 103-acre tract above the Lampasas River in the Texas Hill Country — 98.78 acres of it under active restoration.
The name’s a small joke — there’s no resort, just a cabin, a river, and seven sections of ground that generations of work wore down: decades of grazing, then a hay monoculture that crowded out most of what used to be native here. It came to the family, and we decided to fix it in the open — and to run the work like an institution so it outlasts any one season.
The tract, 103 acres on the Lampasas, came into the family four generations ago. Our great-grandfather, known to everyone as “Short,” farmed wheat in Killeen, Texas, until the federal government took his farm in the 1940s to build what became Fort Hood. Displaced, he was granted this ground in Lampasas County and did here what he had always done: he grew wheat for seed, and by reputation some of the highest-quality wheat seed in the region.
The land he took over was native trees and grasses over heavy cedar. Family accounts have ship-anchor chains strung between two tractors and dragged across the ground to pull every tree out by the roots. Cleared, it became a wheat farm and a steady income for years. In the early 1960s Short built the cabin down by the river with his children — our grandfather and great-aunts. The family home was across the road on separate acreage, where they raised goats and sheep and cut hay; the cabin was the other thing: somewhere to cool off in the Lampasas after a day in the fields. They named it, half in earnest, “Short’s Resort.” The original hand-painted sign was the work of our great-aunts. It has never had running water or electricity; for years propane ran a refrigerator, a stove, a heater and a few lamps, and only remnants of those remain. The outhouse washed away in a flood long ago.
When Short retired from farming he let the field go mostly fallow but kept cattle on it under lease. By the standards we hold now it was grazed harder than the ground could carry — the common practice of the day — and there was no fence holding the cattle off the river. The banks eroded, and so did the central drainage corridor; manure ran off, seasonal floods pushed through, and between them larger old trees went down while little new growth came up. Wild pig and white-tailed deer numbers ran unchecked on top of it. When Short passed and our grandfather took over, the land was kept much the same way for years, as it always had been.
That began to change on a visit to work on the old cabin, when the state of the ground was plain enough to act on. We fenced a hundred feet off the river bank and around the cabin to keep the cattle off the water. It slowed the bank erosion; the overgrazing and the corridor washout on the agricultural plain continued.
Eventually the cattle came off entirely and our grandfather planted the field in Tifton 85 bermudagrass, on USDA advice at the time: a low-maintenance grass that could be cut for hay and carry a small, steady income. For nearly twenty years it was fertilized and cut and looked the part, but over time it built a monoculture across much of the property — an outcome no one intended — that pushed out the native grasses, shrubs and trees, and with them the dove, quail and raptors that had used the ground.
Our grandfather passed in 2023 and the land came to the fourth generation of the family. We grew up coming to the cabin with our grandparents: camping, fishing and swimming in the cool Lampasas, and taking our first deer on this ground. Since 2023 we have been building the proposal now underway: clear the Tifton monoculture and return the ground to native trees, grasses and woody shrubs, to bring back the native birds and riparian woodland species, slow the erosion as far as we can and restore the oak prairie and river habitat this stretch of the Hill Country carried for most of its history. Four generations on, the cabin still stands, and the work is only the newest form of tending the same ground.
The station’s organized into departments: Forestry & Fire, Water & Power, Wildlife Affairs, Agriculture & Grazing, Hospitality, and the Office of the Steward — each with its own seal and its own patch of responsibility. It’s smaller than that sounds. But the structure is the point: it keeps the work legible, hands it off cleanly, and keeps the records honest.
The restoration is supported by two specific grants. Cost-share comes through the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service under the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (NRCS EQIP), administered by the Lampasas County field office. Grassland conversion is supported by a Texas Parks & Wildlife Pastures for Upland Birds (PUB) grant, which is turning our Tifton 85 hayfield back into native prairie. Public support leaves a public trail: practices and outcomes are posted in
Four generations on the same ground. A project meant to outlast the people running it.
The station mostly needs three things, in this order: people who use the open plans and tell us what broke, native seed and cuttings from local provenance and — a distant third — a little money toward materials the grants don’t cover.
If you want to help, the most useful thing is to take the
Field Notes is an Android app for recording what you see and what you do on a piece of ground. A plant, a fence line, a check-in on 40 cuttings you put in last spring — photograph it, say what it is, and it’s saved. It works with no signal, because the places where you need it are the places that don’t have any.
Everything lives on the phone in a plain SQLite database. There is no account to make, no server to sign into, and nothing is uploaded anywhere unless you set up a backup and choose where it goes. That isn’t a privacy stance we bolted on afterwards; it’s the only architecture that works when you’re standing in a creek bottom with one bar.
A capture is a photo, a location, a time and whatever you know about what you’re looking at. From there the app builds the things that are actually hard to keep track of by hand: which mother plant a batch of cuttings came from, how many of them are still alive two seasons later, what a photo point looked like the last time you stood on it, and where the boundary of a management zone is.
Working, on one phone, in one pasture. The core is built and the app is being used daily on the property this site documents. It is not in the Play Store and there is no sign-up list, because handing it to strangers before we’ve broken it ourselves would waste their time.
Things we haven’t finished: syncing between two phones, a desktop companion that runs on something other than a laptop we control, and species identification from a photo (the code is written, the field testing isn’t done). We’ll say so here when those are real.
Coordinates of private land are sensitive, and we treat them that way in the app for the same reason this site publishes species observations at section level and keeps precise points off the map. What the app collects stays on the device unless you move it. The full accounting — including the two cases where a coordinate does leave, and why — is on the
Last updated 28 August 2026 · applies to the Field Notes Android app
Field Notes has no account, no analytics, no advertising and no telemetry. We do not operate a server that your records go to, and we cannot see your data. Everything the app records is stored on your phone. It leaves only when you set up a backup or ask for a species identification, and this page lists every one of those cases.
Photos, audio notes, GPS coordinates and accuracy, timestamps, and whatever you type — species, tags, conditions, notes. Plus the structure you build: properties, management zones, boundaries, plant batches, check-ins, tracks. It is kept in a SQLite database and a folder of files in the app’s private storage, and you can export the whole thing at any time in open formats.
The app asks for camera, microphone, location and storage permissions. Camera and microphone are used only while you are making a capture. Location is used to place a record and to draw your position on the map; a capture that has no fix is saved and flagged as unlocated rather than given a made-up coordinate.
Five cases. Backups, identification and the context lookup only happen because you asked; map imagery loads whenever the map is open, and can be switched off.
The app pushes an encrypted copy across your local network to a machine you own, running the Field Notes desktop receiver. Nothing touches the internet, there is no account, and the receiving computer only ever holds files it cannot read.
If you connect a Google account, the app requests one permission — drive.appdata — which grants access to a hidden folder Drive creates for this app. That folder is not visible in your Drive, no other app can open it, and the app cannot read anything that was already in your Drive. It cannot see your documents, your photos or your email.
The phone encrypts every object before it is uploaded, so Google stores ciphertext under meaningless names and holds no key. Signing in creates no account with us and sends us nothing; the access token stays on your device. You can revoke it at myaccount.google.com/permissions and the app keeps working, minus the uploads.
Identification is off until you supply your own API key. There are two paths and you may use either, both, or neither.
Pl@ntNet receives the photograph and nothing else — no coordinates, no notes, no identifiers. Their handling of it is governed by Pl@ntNet’s own terms, under your key.
A language model of your choosing (Anthropic, OpenAI, or any compatible endpoint you point it at) receives the photograph plus a short description of the circumstances — the month, the ground, what you have already recorded nearby, and the location rounded to roughly a kilometre. That rounding is deliberate: it is enough for a model to rule out the wrong hemisphere and not enough to find your gate. Your key, your account, their terms.
Nothing a machine suggests is ever written down as fact. Every suggestion is kept as a suggestion until you accept it.
The map’s standard view is satellite imagery, drawn from the USGS National Map whenever the map is on screen and the phone has signal; downloading an offline basemap requests tiles from Protomaps. A tile request necessarily reveals which part of the world you are looking at, in the same way loading any map does — it does not carry your records and is not tied to an identity. If you would rather the map ask nothing of anyone, switch the satellite layer off under Layers and use only the offline basemap; imagery tiles can also use mobile data, which is worth knowing on a metered plan.
Off by default. Turned on in Settings, it looks up the weather on the date of a record and the soil under it, so a note written in a wet March still reads correctly three years later. It sends the date and a rounded location to two public services: Open-Meteo for the weather archive and the USDA-NRCS Soil Data Access for the soil survey. No photo, no note, no account, no device identifier.
The location is rounded to about a kilometre before it goes — the same rounding the identification path uses. Weather at that resolution is the same weather; a soil map unit occasionally resolves to the one next door. That is a trade we are happy to make in exchange for not broadcasting a gate.
No analytics or crash reporting SDK. No advertising identifier. No selling or sharing of anything, because there is nowhere for it to be sold from. No account, so no profile. We have no ability to read a backup you have made, encrypted or not — there is no service on our end that receives one.
Encrypted backups use a key wrapped by both a passphrase you choose and a twelve-word recovery phrase the app shows you once. Either one opens it. Neither is stored anywhere but your device and wherever you wrote the recovery phrase down.
The consequence is worth saying plainly: if you lose the passphrase and the recovery phrase, the backup is gone. Not gone-as-in-file-a-support-ticket. Gone. We cannot recover it, and an app that could would be an app whose promises were false.
Records you delete are marked deleted and dropped from the app; uninstalling removes the database and the files with it. Copies you have already sent to Drive or to your own computer are yours to remove — Drive’s hidden app folder can be cleared from Google’s storage settings, and revoking the permission stops any further uploads.
The app is not directed at children and collects nothing about anyone’s identity, age or contacts.
If this changes we will change this page and move the date at the top. There is no mailing list to notify because we don’t have your address.
Short’s Resort Field Station, Lampasas County, Texas. shortsresorttx@gmail.com.
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Six seals, six sections of responsibility. The station is small — mostly one family and its friends — but the structure is real: it makes the work legible, hands it off cleanly and keeps the records honest.
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