Introducing EcoScribe: Automation That Gives Ecologists Their Week Back

We build a lot of things at OakFox, but we only turn one into its own venture when a problem keeps showing up and nobody has solved it properly. Biodiversity reporting is that problem. Today we’re introducing EcoScribe — automation that gives ecologists their week back.

The problem we kept hearing about

Talk to anyone running a small ecological consultancy and you hear the same thing. The fieldwork — the part that actually needs their expertise — takes a day. The writing takes the rest of the week.

A Preliminary Ecological Appraisal site visit takes about half a day; the report takes four to five days spread across six weeks. A single Biodiversity Net Gain assessment can generate an 80-to-120-page documentation pack. Sustainable Farming Incentive applications pull farmers away from their land and into spreadsheets. Across all of it, experienced specialists spend forty to fifty per cent of their billable week formatting tables and retyping boilerplate that is nearly identical from one job to the next.

Biodiversity Net Gain has been mandatory in England since 2024, and the paperwork is only getting heavier. The people with the deepest field knowledge are ending up with the least time to do fieldwork. That struck us as exactly the wrong outcome for a policy meant to protect nature.

What EcoScribe does

EcoScribe takes the report writing, grant drafting, and compliance paperwork off an ecologist’s plate — drafted from the data they already collect, in their own templates, and reviewed by them before anything goes out.

• Report automation — PEA, EIA, and BNG reports generated from field data, typically saving four to six hours per PEA.
• Grant and scheme drafting — first-draft SFI, Countryside Stewardship, and BNG submissions from the farm and project data you already hold.
• Compliance workflows — BNG monitoring, carbon records, and certification captured into an audit-ready archive.

The line we won’t cross

There is a wave of tools arriving in this space that promise BNG assessments “with no ecologist needed.” We think that’s the wrong idea, and we’ve built EcoScribe on the opposite principle: it never makes an ecological judgement.

Species identification, habitat evaluation, risk assessment, and survey design stay with the qualified ecologist — start to finish. EcoScribe handles the writing and administration around that judgement, not the judgement itself. It’s a tool for ecologists, built by people who think the expertise is the whole point.

Built the OakFox way

EcoScribe carries the principles OakFox is built on. Everything runs on UK-hosted, verified renewable-powered infrastructure, with model choices made with energy cost in mind. Client data is GDPR-handled, never used to train external models, and never shared between clients. And rather than being one more platform to onboard into, it integrates with the booking systems, CRMs, and templates a practice already uses.

Take a look

If you run an ecological consultancy, a regenerative farm, or a conservation trust that’s drowning in reporting, we’d genuinely like to hear how the admin burden is landing for you.

Visit EcoScribe → — or read the journal for our plain-English guides to what a PEA actually contains, what it costs, and how BNG is reshaping the sector.