How Pease Park Conservancy Replaced Pen-and-Paper Park Management With a Live Map-Based Operations Platform

Pease Park Conservancy is a nonprofit organization responsible for restoring, enhancing, and maintaining Austin's first public park, an 84-acre urban green space that runs along Shoal Creek in the heart of the city. The Conservancy works in partnership with the City of Austin to steward the park's ecology, history, and public accessibility for the surrounding community.

The park's staff manages a wide range of ongoing field activities: tracking and removing invasive species, maintaining native plantings, monitoring wildlife, responding to graffiti and vandalism, and coordinating regular maintenance across a large, open-access landscape. Because Pease Park has no gates or barriers, foot traffic continues around the clock, and staff are required to respond to field conditions that can change at any time across a large and varied terrain.

Before Matidor, park staff relied on pen and paper and their own memory to manage field operations. Team members had developed an impressive ability to recall and describe specific locations by name, but translating that knowledge into organized, shareable, actionable records was inefficient and time-consuming. There was no reliable way to log where an issue was found, assign follow-up tasks, or communicate location-based information between staff members working in different parts of the park.

The absence of a spatial system meant that issues could not be easily tracked from discovery to resolution. Staff could identify a problem and describe where it was, but without a map-based record, there was no way to ensure it was followed up on, prioritized, or handed off cleanly to another team member. ​

A real-world example illustrated the gap clearly. During a Matidor team visit to the park, a baby tortoise was spotted near one of the pathways, clearly not a native species. Someone had abandoned the animal in the park. Without a way to log its exact location, assign a task, and notify the right staff member in real time, the tortoise could not be tracked down. Despite follow-up efforts, it was never located.

The City of Austin had recommended a conventional GIS platform, but as a lean nonprofit organization, Pease Park did not have the budget to hire a GIS specialist or invest in complex training. They needed something that was map-based, affordable, and fast to adopt.