Remote onboarding, in everyday language

Say this in one breath: a field worker takes a photo on site. The photo gets a fingerprint. A different person in the office looks at it. An auditor locks it. Then you can download a standard ZIP of those locked visits.

MRV means Measuring, Reporting, and Verification. In plain English: prove what was seen, keep a record, and let someone else check it.

You do not need to be a software engineer. If you can open a website, sign in, and click a button, you can follow this session.

New partners often hear “nature platform” and assume credits, carbon tonnes, or a finished TNFD filing. JoinEcoGrow is the evidence layer underneath those things.

Satellite pictures, AI species names, and QR stickers can help you look. They are not the locked visit. A human still decides.

Role 1 — Field agent: the person standing at the tree, pond, or habitat. They take the photo, keep GPS on, and submit.

Role 2 — Ecologist (office “reviewer”): a different signed-in person. They approve or send it back. They cannot approve their own visit. That rule is in the database, not just a policy PDF.

Role 3 — Auditor (office “admin”): they lock the record. After lock, the visit is frozen. Identifications can be superseded with a new version. They are not silently overwritten.

On today’s live system the office statuses you will see are still the everyday words submitted, approved, and locked — not a special label called auditor_locked.

Install once. Android uses a preview APK (not the public Play Store). iPhone uses Apple TestFlight (not the public App Store). Someone in the office must invite the email first.

Sign in with the work email. If sign-in fails, check typos, then check that the invite was approved. Offline mode can capture, but it cannot finish review.

On Home you will see Capture, Map, Tasks, and Profile. Capture evidence is the main job: pick the site, take the asset photo, wait until GPS accuracy looks sensible, save.

QR stickers are optional. They are a link ID for a tagged tree. Do not tape a personal “My Code” to a tree. You can still capture a site visit without scanning.

If someone later swaps the picture for a nicer one, the fingerprint no longer matches. That is the point.

The fingerprint is stored with the visit and, after lock, in the Darwin Core multimedia table. An outsider with the photo file can hash it themselves and compare.

The audit trail is a chain of those kinds of fingerprints for each change: submitted, approved, locked, exported. Each new row names the previous fingerprint. If a row in the middle is edited, the chain no longer lines up.

That is tamper-evident. It is not a courtroom seal and it is not “the database can never be wrong”. It means silent edits are visible if someone checks the chain.

Sign in on a laptop. Open Field evidence. That is the office desk: a list of visits, a map, and the reason the app is confident or unsure.

Open a submitted visit. Check the photo, the pin, the accuracy in metres, and any tape measurement. Approve, or send it back with a short note the field agent can act on.

You cannot approve a visit you created. If the button refuses, that is the product working.

Satellite or “have a look here” cards are discovery only. They suggest where a person might walk. They are not approved evidence.

On the live office desk, approval and lock are how a visit becomes exportable. Draft and unlocked visits stay out of the Darwin Core ZIP.

If taxonomy needs a correction later, a new identification supersedes the old one. History stays. That is how an auditor can see what changed.

Sensitive species can have the map pin rounded to a 1 km grid in the export so the public ZIP does not hand out a nest location. The fact of rounding is recorded, not hidden.

A sceptical person will ask: “Can someone in IT change the spreadsheet?” The honest answer: the visit table is append-only for audit rows. Updates and deletes are rejected. New facts are new rows.

The hash mixes the previous fingerprint with a canonical description of the event (who, what, when, before, after). Kitchen version: each page of the notebook starts by copying the last page’s stamp.

Office users do not type hashes. The trusted append path writes them. A raw insert that guesses the hash would either fail or, with a powerful key, silently break the chain — which is why the product does not invite that shortcut.

Field evidence shows counts, a map, field tasks, and download panels. Overview is the higher-level site dashboard.

If you are not signed in, the page will send you to login. That is expected. Field agents can capture; they still cannot download the Darwin Core ZIP.

Remote sensing / “look here” tools, when you see them, stay in beta language: they suggest a walk, they do not approve a visit.

Nature Evidence Pack: the file you attach to a grant or a condition. It is not a statutory calculator.

Darwin Core Archive: a ZIP of text tables — event, occurrence, multimedia — plus packing notes. Ecologist or auditor only. Only approved and locked visits. Field agents cannot press this button.

A labelled SAMPLE ZIP exists so a remote teammate can unzip the format without a password. The filename starts with SAMPLE. Live export does not include the layman README; the sample does.

Walk the home page slowly. Play the six-step phone story if it is on screen. Open the FAQ and read the credit and TNFD answers out loud.

Open /mrv and notice what is live versus what is still a QA fixture. Counts on that page are dated. Do not invent newer numbers on a sales call.

Download the SAMPLE Darwin Core ZIP. Confirm the filename starts with SAMPLE. Open READ_ME_LAYMAN.txt.

Field staff: office approves the email, then sends the install link. Allow camera and location. Capture on the assigned site only.

Ecologists and auditors: website sign-in. Bookmark Field evidence. First week: review a handful of visits together on a call, with this page still open.

If something fails, write down the exact on-screen sentence. “It didn’t work” is not enough to debug a remote session.