Our species, ecosystem, and threat profiles cover a subject wherever it appears in the world. Field Notes goes the other direction — starting from a single place, and going deep into everything documented about its wildlife and habitat.
A profile of the orangutan tells you what's happening to orangutans, wherever they're found. It doesn't tell you what's happening to Borneo — the specific mix of species, pressures, and conservation efforts converging on one piece of land at the same time. Some of the most important environmental stories only make sense at that scale: a single island where a keystone species, a rainforest, and an industry are all under the same pressure at once.
Field Notes is our attempt to cover that scale properly. Each report is a status check on one location — not a travel piece, and not a single-species profile, but a evidence-based snapshot of what's known about a place right now.
The first Field Notes report covers Borneo — one of the world's oldest rainforests, and home to the Bornean orangutan, the Bornean pygmy elephant, and the Bornean rhinoceros, which is now considered functionally extinct in the wild across almost its entire former range. It's a location where deforestation, species decline, and conservation response are all documented well enough to tell a clear, sourced story.
We're planning ten location reports in total: Borneo, the Amazon, the Congo Basin, Svalbard, the Great Barrier Reef, the Serengeti–Mara, Madagascar, Sumatra, the Pantanal, and the Western Ghats. Each is held to the same sourcing standard as the rest of the platform, and new reports will be added as they clear our editorial review, rather than on a fixed schedule — we'd rather publish a report late than publish one that isn't properly sourced.