Fieldwalker is a permaculture design tool that helps you create professional site plans — from base map to finished design document. This guide walks you through the core workflow: creating a project, setting up your site, generating contours, detecting existing features, designing, and exporting.
Create a project
After signing up, you land on the Dashboard — a grid of your projects.
- Click New project, give it a name (and optionally a description), and you're in.
Each project holds one or more maps. A map is an aerial image of a site that you design on top of. You can have multiple maps in a single project — useful if you're working on different areas of the same property, or if you want a broad overview map alongside detail maps of specific zones.
Add a map
You have two options:
Satellite capture
- Click New Map. A full-screen satellite view opens.
- Search for an address or pan/zoom to your site.
- Click Draw Area and drag a bounding box around the property.
- Choose your resolution — the default uses your current zoom level;
- Click Capture Image and Fieldwalker stitches the satellite tiles into a single, properly-scaled aerial image.
Max resolution fetches the sharpest available tiles.
Upload your own image
- Click Upload Image and drag in a JPEG or PNG (up to 50 MB).
This works for drone photos, scanned survey maps, or any other aerial imagery you have. If the image has GPS data embedded (EXIF), Fieldwalker will detect it and offer one-click georeferencing.
Set the location (georeferencing)
If you used satellite capture, your map is already georeferenced — it knows where it is in the world and what scale it's at. You're ready to generate contours.
If you uploaded a custom image, you'll need to georeference it.
- Open the Map tab in the editor and click Set Location.
- Click matching landmarks on both sides to create control points — a corner of a building, the end of a fence line, a distinctive tree.
A side-by-side view appears: your image on the left, a satellite map on the right.
Two points are the minimum; four or more give the best accuracy.
Once georeferenced, your image is anchored to real-world coordinates. Measurements, contour generation, and AI detection all depend on this step.
Generate contours
Open the Contours tab. Choose a contour interval — the spacing between contour lines.
- For most sites, 1 metre is a good starting point.
- For small suburban blocks where subtle grade changes matter, try 0.5 metres.
- For broadacre overview, 5 or 10 metres.
Click Generate Contours. The tool retrieves elevation data for your site and generates contour lines. This takes 10–30 seconds for larger areas. When complete, a summary shows the interval, line count, elevation data source, and resolution.
The contour lines appear on your map as a toggleable layer. You can adjust their colour, opacity, and weight in the Contours tab. If you want a different interval, change it and click Regenerate.
About elevation data accuracy: Fieldwalker tells you what elevation source it's using and what resolution you're working with. High-resolution data (50cm or better) produces contours accurate enough for earthworks design. Coarser data (30m - default for most locations) shows the broad terrain shape but shouldn't be relied on for precise swale or dam placement. The tool warns you when the chosen interval is finer than the data supports.
Set your property boundary
Open the Layers tab and find the Boundary row.
If your property is in Victoria, NSW, Queensland, Tasmania, Western Australia, or New Zealand, click the auto-load button to fetch your property boundary from official cadastral data. A picker shows nearby parcels — select yours. The boundary appears as a locked, labelled line on your map.
For properties elsewhere, or when the auto-load doesn't find the right parcel, use Enter GPS coordinates. You can type coordinates directly, paste them from another source, or upload a KML, GeoJSON, or CSV file.
You can also draw a boundary freehand directly on the canvas.
Detect existing features
Your satellite image contains lots of useful information about location of trees, roads, building and other things. While our design tools make it easy for you to manually place these onto your design, automatically detecting these features can speed the process.
- Open the Design tab.
- In the Point Detection card, click the detect button (or press D) to activate the point-detect tool.
- Click any feature on the map — a tree, a building, a patch of vegetation, a body of water. Fieldwalker's AI identifies it, draws an outline, and tells you what it thinks it is.
- You can accept the detection (press Enter) to add it to your map, or reject it if the identification is wrong — providing feedback that helps improve future detection accuracy.
Detected features appear as annotation polygons on the canvas. To turn them into proper design symbols, use the Convert tool (press C) — click a detected tree area and it becomes an illustrated tree symbol in the permaculture design style. A dense vegetation detection becomes an amorphous canopy blob. A building becomes a building symbol.
The Tree Count slider (in the Convert Detections card) controls how many individual tree symbols a vegetation detection expands into when converted.
Design
The Design Toolbar floats at the top-left of the canvas. It contains 12 tools organised into three groups.
Placement tools — Trees (1), Buildings (2), Water (3), Garden Beds (4), Dense Vegetation (5).
Click the canvas to place a symbol.
Polyline tools — Paths (6), Fences (7), Earthworks (8), Watercourses (9).
Click a sequence of points to draw a line.
Polygon / other — Zones (0), Areas (−), Labels (T).
Each tool has a keyboard shortcut (the number/letter shown above). Press the shortcut to activate the tool; press it again to cycle through variants. You can also hold click or right-click a tool to see its variants — different tree types, fence types, earthwork types, and so on.
Placing elements: Click the canvas to place.
Your cursor changes to show you're in placement mode. Click the same tool button again (or press Escape) to deactivate and return to selection mode. If you click on an existing element instead of empty canvas, the tool steps aside and selects that element.
Editing elements: Select any element and its properties appear in the Design tab's Properties card.
You can change the type, adjust dimensions, set status (Existing vs Proposed), and fine-tune appearance. Right-click any element for a context menu with duplicate, delete, and layer-ordering options.
Undo/Redo: ⌘Z to undo, ⌘⇧Z to redo. Every action — placing, moving, resizing, deleting, reordering — is undoable.
Design styles: In the Design tab's Style Settings, toggle between Illustrated (the default permaculture illustration style) and Schematic (cleaner, more diagrammatic).
Schematic mode has a Hand-drawn intensity slider — from clean lines at 0% through natural hand-drawn character at 100% to a rough sketch feel at 200%.
Export your design
Open the Export tab. You have two options:
Quick PNG — One click, and you get a high-resolution PNG of exactly what's visible on screen.
A4 landscape, cream paper, no title bar. Good for quick shares and progress updates.
Full preview — Click Open preview for a complete export modal.
- Choose page size and orientation.
- Pan and zoom your map within the page frame to set the crop.
- Toggle individual layers on or off.
- Adjust stroke weight. Choose cream or white paper.
- The title block, legend, north arrow, and scale bar are all included.
What you see in the preview is exactly what you'll download.
Formats: PNG (high-resolution raster), SVG (clean vector file, editable in Illustrator/Inkscape), and PDF (professional document, requires active subscription).
Watermark: During the free trial and for unsubscribed users, SVG and PNG exports include a Fieldwalker watermark. Subscribe to remove it. PDF export requires an active subscription.
Keyboard shortcuts
Press ? at any time in the editor to see the full shortcut overlay.
Design tools
Press again to cycle the object type
Tool | Shortcut |
Trees | 1 |
Buildings | 2 |
Water | 3 |
Garden Beds | 4 |
Dense Veg | 5 |
Paths | 6 |
Fences | 7 |
Earthworks | 8 |
Watercourses | 9 |
Zones | 0 |
Areas | − |
Labels | T |
Canvas tools
Tool | Shortcut |
Select | V |
Pan | H |
Point Detect | D |
Pin | M |
Measure | U |
Elevation | E |
Editing
Action | Shortcut |
Undo | ⌘Z |
Redo | ⌘⇧Z |
Duplicate | ⌘D |
Delete | ⌫ |
Select All | ⌘A |
Copy | ⌘C |
Paste | ⌘V |
Cut | ⌘X |
Zoom to Object | Z |
Nudge | arrow keys |
Nudge 10px | Shift + arrows |
Navigation: Mouse wheel to zoom. Hold Space to pan. Pinch-to-zoom on touch devices.
Mobile and field work
On a phone, Fieldwalker switches to a mobile interface built for field data collection.
The design toolbar is hidden — design work stays on desktop/tablet — but you can view your map, toggle layers, and generate contours.
Most importantly, use the field tools:
- Field Walker (live GPS navigation),
- Contour Walker (walk contour lines),
- Observations (notes and photos on pins),
- and Offline mode (download your map for field use with no signal).
See the Mobile Field Guide for full details on field tools.
Your subscription
Fieldwalker offers a 7-day free trial with full access to all features. Exports during the trial carry a watermark.
After the trial, subscribe for $29/month AUD (incl. GST) to continue designing and exporting without watermarks. Your projects and data are never deleted — if your trial ends or you cancel, everything is still there when you come back.
Manage your subscription, update payment details, or view billing history from Billing in the account menu.