While working in the field in Botswana, Angola and Namibia, our team realized that there were few good open source tools that met the specific needs of field research. To respond to this need we created FieldKit and brought thousands of people along with us into the Okavango Delta on a ‘live data’ expedition to continuously measure the heartbeat of this system. After 3 years of development and testing FieldKit is now a publicly available, fully featured tool. Fieldkit is a standardized, open-source software and hardware platform that gives individuals and organizations the tools to collect and share field-based research data and to tell stories through interactive visualizations for conservation, science, exploration and education.