Cam IncollThe first thing most of us want to know about a piece of land is simple: what does it do? Where does the water run, where does it pool, where does the slope ease off enough to build on? Everything else in a design depends on those answers.
Over the last few releases we've been shortening the road from "I'd like to look at my land" to "I can see how it falls", and with Fieldwalker 1.8 that road gets both shorter and sharper. You can start from an address, see your land with contours before you create an account, and, where better elevation data exists for your property, get contours detailed enough to make real decisions on.
Start with an address, not a sign up screen
Type your address on the Fieldwalker website or in the app and suggestions appear as you type, from your own country first. Pick one and the map opens right on your property. There's no project to name and no imagery to hunt down. If you'd rather start from your own drone photo or an existing plan, you can upload it, and Fieldwalker guides you through positioning it one matching point at a time.
See your land before you sign up
Draw the area you care about and Fieldwalker shows you a preview of your property with its contours, before you've created an account. If you like what you see, choose Keep this map, sign up or log in, and the same map opens in the editor, saved to your account. Nothing to redo. It works on your phone as well as your laptop.
Contours that draw themselves, and tell you the truth
As soon as a map has a location, Fieldwalker reads the elevation for your site and draws the contours. There's no button to find. It picks a sensible interval from the size of your property and the detail in the data, and it never draws lines finer than the data can support.
A short note in the Contours panel says plainly where the data came from and how detailed it is, with names like "US 3DEP LiDAR, 1 m" or "US 3DEP elevation (10 m)".
What a 1 metre surface shows you that 30 metres doesn't
This is where the detail starts to matter. At around 30 metres per pixel, the ground is smoothed into broad strokes. You'll see which way the land generally falls, and where the big ridges and valleys run. A gully a few metres wide simply vanishes. So does the subtle shoulder of a ridge, or the low spot behind a track where water hangs around after rain.
At 1 metre, those features come back. The gully shows up as a tight bend in the lines. The ridge you could only feel underfoot becomes a clear change in direction. The contours start to match what you see when you walk the paddock, and that is when they become useful for design: placing a swale on a true contour, so it holds water instead of shedding it to one end; choosing a dam site where the lines really do converge; reading which way water will move before you move any soil.
High-resolution contours, by plan
Here's how it works from 1.8.
- Pro and Founder: contours on every map come from the best elevation data available for that property, sourced through an elevation provider. Where that data doesn't exist, we fallback to the next best available. And you always get whichever is finer and at worst the resoltion will be 30m.
- Free 7-day trial: you get high-resolution contours on one map: the first map where better data exists than the free sources. A map you kept from the address preview can be that map.
- Later trial maps and the Free plan: While on trial mode, subsequent maps will be a the default 30m resolution. Where better data exists for your property, the Contours panel tells you so and offers an upgrade.
If you move down to Free, the contours you've already drawn stay exactly as they are. If you redraw them, they'll use the free data, and Fieldwalker warns you before it does. Use Regenerate contours whenever you want a fresh redraw, for example right after upgrading, and it always starts from fresh data. Exports credit each dataset with its own licence.
Honest about coverage
Coverage is uneven, and we don't want to oversell it. The best data is 1 metre LiDAR across much of the US, England, the Netherlands, Germany and New Zealand, along with other parts of Europe, plus 5 m LiDAR in some Australian cities and coastline where the default source has none.
When we checked samples of real properties, better data turned up for every US property, about a quarter of the European ones and a third of the Australian city ones. For regional Australia, none. There, contours mostly come from Geoscience Australia's 5 metre LiDAR where it exists, and otherwise from about 30 metre global data. That's still useful for the overall shape of your land, but it won't show you a small gully.
If your property sits where the free data is all there is, you aren't stuck. You can request sourced LiDAR (a Premium feature) and we’ll do our best to find some better elevation data for you, or you can upload your own elevation file from a drone or a local source. The Contours panel will say what's available.
From the desk to the paddock
Better elevation doesn't only help at the desk. When you head out with Field walk, your pins and design lines sit on the same surface you're standing on. With Contour walk, you lock to the height under your boots and follow that line across the slope. When the contour comes from 1 metre data, the guidance follows the real ground, so the line you're walking is much closer to genuinely level. On a 30 metre surface, a contour is a smoothed approximation, and the ground under your boots can differ from it.
The same goes for water: the better the surface, the more believable the story it tells about where water arrives and settles.
Try it on your own land
Type your address into Fieldwalker and see what your land looks like. If your property has better data available, you'll see it in the Contours panel along with the real name and resolution of the dataset. Then take it for a walk with Field walk, and let us know what the land tells you.