The Land Stewards Journal (LSJ) is a free Microsoft Windows software tool to help landowners, organizations and businesses track and analyze their stewardship work and progress. LSJ is organized around the cycle of planning, action and monitoring that is the core of successful land stewardship projects.
LSJ is designed to be flexible enough to meet the needs of casual users as well as those wanting to keep and search more detailed records. In most cases the only information absolutely required is a name or description of the record you are creating.
LSJ provides time and cost tracking for all stages of stewardship work. For actions and assessment LSJ also provides a way to keep track of who helped. An address book of helpers allows you to group them by driving distance, interests and availability.
Time required to enter information is minimized wherever possible. Point and click lookups and lists help reduce typing time. Limiting the number of required inputs allows you to decide how much information to record.
Reports summarize information recorded in LSJ, but more importantly what that information means in terms of changes on your land.
A complete help system and a Quick Start guide are included to get you up and running.
The program includes a Wisconsin species lookup database which currently has over 4000 vascular plants and vertebrates. The lookup database inlcudes common names, family, genus and species name. Also whether the organism is native, invasive, a state listed species and (for native plants) what the Coefficient of Conservation value is, allowing automatic calculation of Wisconsin's Floristic Quality Index at the property and unit levels. Species information can be transferred into LSJ with a single button click. A web search for information on a species can be launched with a button click.
Photos, videos, sound recordings and external documents can all be linked to locations or records for easy access and display.
LSJ lets you set up photo points and and compare photos.
A calendar view provides a overview of planned and past activities and events. Clicking on the calendar takes you to the record for that item.
A reference library feature stores links to documents and other information not associated with a property or unit.
LSJ currently only supports maps as simple images, but GPS coordinates and polygon information can be entered for property, units and plant patches. Planned software improvements include integration of LSJ information with GIS mapping software and map based reports showing changes on your property.
LSJ can be run in single landowner mode to simplify the user interface or it can be run with multiple owners to accommodate organizations and businesses. Owners can have multiple properties and each property can have multiple management units.