Owletts Ecology

Our Story

When I came into land management after twenty years in engineering, I instinctively wanted a model. In engineering, we rarely build anything before we've modelled it — a digital twin. So I started trying to do that for the land.

First, the boundaries — even in the wide open countryside, people argue over fence lines. Then the shape of the land — its contours, its drainage, its potential — and somewhere to layer up everything I was learning.

I looked for the right tools. Engineering CAD is heavyweight and expensive. SketchUp gives you shapes but no way to annotate them with land-management features. The Land App is wonderful for sharing layers with agents and consultants — but it's a mapping and recording tool, not an engineering one.

After a while I just got caught up in the land itself. Talking to ecologists, taking pictures, holding things in my head. It worked, for a time.

Then we came around to ecosystem services — wetland creation, natural flood management, biodiversity net gain — and engaged consultants. Each produced exciting, useful work, but each in its own separate world: CAD drawings; photomaps and a LiDAR point cloud; an Excel workbook of soil carbon numbers. Meanwhile a neighbour had gone off and done some open-source line-of-sight modelling to work out how to reopen the 1870s designed views from Hammerwood Park.

Then I had to write a report pulling together eighteen months of work, and it was a horror. All of this knowledge, scattered across a dozen formats and platforms, with no common thread.

That was when it clicked. What we're doing on the farm is exactly what I've spent my career doing in engineering: digital models for rapid prototyping; remote monitoring — trail cameras, bat detectors, river gauges — for day-to-day intelligence; workflows for coordination, learning, and reporting; and for the most interesting technical questions — where the water flows, where to put leaky dams, how a new wetland might perform — computational modelling.

Conveniently, that's what my PhD was on. In the early 2000s I was modelling thermodynamics and fluid flows for advanced power generation — for the likes of NASA and Rolls-Royce. A long way from farming, but the underlying physics is the same: conservation of mass, momentum, and energy. The length scales are just hectares instead of square millimetres, with considerably less budget for fancy software.

So we built the tools ourselves. Much of the data is freely available — the Environment Agency publishes LiDAR, Natural England publishes habitat inventories, the BGS publishes geology and soils. We supplemented these with high-precision drone surveys and bespoke fieldwork. Once the models were producing reliable results for our farm, the natural next step was to make them available to other land stewards facing the same challenges.

And so Owletts Ecology was born.

Three Steps

1. Draw your catchment on an interactive map.
2. We run the analysis — downloading datasets, processing terrain, running the models. Automatically.
3. You get results — interactive maps, site reports, downloadable GIS data. Ready for planning submissions or just understanding your land better.