/00/Case study / 2022 · Biodiversity non-profit

Moss
Atlas

A living map of soil microbiome data for 2,400 regenerative farms.

// role
Product strategy
Design system
Full-stack engineering
Offline PWA
// stack
TypeScriptReactPostGISRailsMapLibre
// duration
11 months
// team
4 GreenCoders · 2 embedded
Moss Atlas v2 — public
Soil biome across 2,400 farms
farms
2,412
species
18k
uptime
99.98%
/01/Summary

Moss Atlas set out to turn ten years of soil microbiome research into a public atlas — usable by farmers in the field and policy teams at their desks.

2,412
farms mapped
36h
offline sync
180k
monthly visits
99.98%
uptime
/02/
Challenge

Field-workers across Europe collect soil samples in areas with no cell signal. The old FileMaker workflow lost data, duplicated entries, and none of it reached the public dashboard until a quarterly manual export.

/03/
Approach

We built an offline-first PWA with conflict-free replicated state (Yjs), a MapLibre vector tile pipeline for the public atlas, and a Rails API with PostGIS for the spatial queries. Weekly field tests with actual agronomists drove the UX.

/04/
Outcome

Public atlas now serves 180,000 monthly visitors. Field-workers sync 36 hours of work offline without losing a single record. The dashboard became the reference data source cited in two EU policy papers.

/05/ Across devices

Same system. Every surface.

Field Sync
Pending uploads · 14
queued
14
last sync
4h ago
Species Index
Fungi · 6,412 taxa
species
6,412
new /mo
+38
/06/Process

Four seasons, in order.

/01/ Seed

Three-week discovery across four field seasons. Shadowed agronomists. Mapped the data pipeline back to the lab.

/02/ Sprout

Clickable PWA prototype tested with 12 field-workers in Bavaria and Andalusia. Killed two features, added one.

/03/ Canopy

Shipped in 11 two-week rings. Each ring ended with a real field sync. CRDT conflict rules tuned per ring.

/04/ Harvest

Launched the public atlas alongside the v2 field app. Quarterly care contract now in year three.

/07/Details

Moments that earn a pause.

Regional Health
Loire Valley · index 0.82
farms
184
trend
+4%
Moss Atlas v2 — public
Soil biome across 2,400 farms
farms
2,412
species
18k
/08/Full composition

One system, three frames.

greencode://work/field-sync
Field Sync
Pending uploads · 14
queued
14
last sync
4h ago
Field Sync
Pending uploads · 14
queued
14
last sync
4h ago
Field Sync
Pending uploads · 14
queued
14
last sync
4h ago
/09/ In their words
"GreenCode treated our data like it was soil — slow, alive, worth protecting. The field team asked for no changes in the first quarter. That has never happened."
Dr. Elena Bauer · Lead ecologist, Moss Atlas Foundation