Audio knowledge platform
Type any topic. Fieldnotes searches across academic papers, policy reports, community research, think tank publications, and practitioner research — then builds a structured audio briefing, written the way a brilliant friend would explain it. Honest about the evidence. Honest about the mess.
Urban heat islands & climate adaptation strategies
+ 2 more chapters
Urban heat islands & climate adaptation strategies
+ 2 more chapters
What it is
A summary tells you the conclusion. A Fieldnote tells you the story — the received wisdom, the study that complicated it, the researchers who disagree, and the question nobody has answered yet.
The host has read everything on the topic and is telling you what they found — what's striking, what's counterintuitive, and where the science is genuinely messy. Not briefing a committee. Talking to a thoughtful friend who has twenty minutes on the train.
Start with whatever is on your mind. "Just transition policy." "Youth employment in West Africa." Something you've been meaning to understand for months.
Pick your length — 5, 12, or 20 minutes. Set your context — Commute, Workout, Winding down, or Focused read. The tone and depth adapt to fit where you actually are.
Our system draws from 200M+ open academic papers, policy reports, and think tank briefs. Minutes later: a guided audio seminar, a debate map, source-traced claims, and an unresolved question worth sitting with.
Resume where you left off. Add notes, tag ideas, subscribe to the topic. Everything lands in your Research Notebook — a personal knowledge base that gets richer every session.
What it searches
Most tools search one type of source. Fieldnotes searches across six — and classifies, ranks, and traces every result.
Semantic Scholar + OpenAlex — ranked by recency and citation count
World Bank, government reports, intergovernmental briefs
CORE — the world's largest open access aggregator
Brookings, RAND, OECD, Gates Foundation, and hundreds more
The Open Library — researcher and practitioner submissions
A hand-maintained library of foundational texts across every domain
GDELT, Global Voices, and ReliefWeb — real-time voices from 65+ countries
Every Fieldnote shows what percentage of claims trace back to a specific paper or DOI — and what percentage is synthesised from broader knowledge. The Sources tab lists all references with type badges and links.
The evidence map
Alongside the audio, every Fieldnote includes a structured map of the intellectual landscape — the strongest arguments in favour, the strongest counter-arguments, and the genuine tensions researchers haven't resolved. Each claim is attributed to a source. You can flag anything you think is wrong, outdated, or missing a perspective.
Urban tree canopy reduces surface temperatures by up to 8°C in dense city cores
Green infrastructure generates $3–7 of co-benefits per $1 invested
Night-time cooling from vegetation reduces heat-related mortality by 15–30% in vulnerable populations
Irrigation demands for urban greenery can offset climate benefits in water-scarce regions
Cooling effects are highly localised — rarely extending beyond 100m from the intervention
Whether city-wide cooling requires networked green corridors or can be achieved through fragmented planting
How cooling benefits are distributed across income levels within the same city
From a real Fieldnote on urban heat islands. Generate your own →
The listen experience
Four controls, one Fieldnote. Choose your length, set your listening context, pick a debate lens, and tell us who you are. The output changes at every level — not just tone, but structure, framing, and the questions it leaves you with.
Choose your length
Quick brief
The core argument in a nutshell
Deep dive
Full arc — complication, disagreement, open question
Full seminar
Every dimension, every nuance unpacked
Set your context
Commute
Punchy, energetic. Tight sentences. Momentum.
Workout
Bold, direct. Clear stakes. Minimal hedging.
Winding down
Calm, reflective. A little philosophical.
Focused read
Analytical, thorough. Every nuance included.
Same research, same topic — the energy, sentence length, and pacing adapt to where you actually are.
Debate lens
— how should the evidence be framed?Balanced
All sides, equal weight
Compelling
The strongest case for it
Critical
Sceptical, challenges the evidence
Exploratory
Open questions and unknowns
Personalise
— role, purpose, and focusWho is this for?
What's the purpose?
Foresight mode
When you ask a forward-looking question — "the future of X", "where is Y headed", "what could change about Z" — Fieldnotes detects it and switches to foresight mode.
The host becomes a strategic analyst and futures thinker. The narrative shifts from research synthesis to signal reading: what is already in motion, which futures are plausible, what nobody can yet resolve.
The evidence map changes too — trends, opportunities, and uncertainties instead of for, against, and unresolved. Reflection prompts ask what you would experiment with, what assumption you would challenge, what signal you would watch.
Remote work has permanently redistributed labour supply away from superstar cities — commuter rail usage in London and NYC remains 20–30% below 2019 levels.
Distributed infrastructure investment models — funding roads, broadband, and housing in secondary cities ahead of population movement rather than behind it.
Whether proximity benefits in innovation clusters are recoverable through hybrid arrangements, or whether dispersion permanently erodes them.
94% of studies on urban heat mitigation come from North America, Europe, and East Asia. Evidence from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia — where the problem is most acute — is sparse.
Most cooling studies use short observation windows (1–3 years). Long-term data on whether green infrastructure benefits persist or degrade over decades is largely absent.
Frontline urban practitioners — maintenance teams, housing officers, community groups — are almost entirely absent from the academic literature on implementation.
Honest about what it doesn't know
When the evidence is geographically concentrated, Fieldnotes flags it. When the studies are all from one era, or all use the same method, or all come from academic institutions with no practitioner voice — it says so.
The evidence gaps section names 3–5 specific gaps: where, why they matter, and what kind of research would fill them.
This is not a disclaimer. It is part of the output. Understanding the shape of what is missing is part of understanding the topic.
Start from your own research
Upload your interviews, field notes, transcripts, or reports and Fieldnotes builds the briefing around your material. Your direct quotes, specific findings, and named participants are preserved and foregrounded.
The broader academic and policy literature is brought in to corroborate, challenge, and extend what you found — not to replace it. The source diversity tracker shows how your material sits alongside the external evidence base.
For researchers, journalists, consultants, and analysts who generate primary knowledge, not just consume it.
Your research
Interviews, transcripts, reports, field notes
Your material anchors the narrative. External sources corroborate, challenge, and extend — they don't displace.
Thousands of papers, policy briefs, and think tank reports are published every year. Almost none get read past the abstract — not because the research is bad, but because the format is broken.
Fieldnotes is built for the person who has twenty minutes on the train, not a sabbatical. Your commute, your workout, your lunch break — every listen fits where you actually are.
Every Fieldnote lands in your Research Notebook. Add notes, tag ideas, subscribe to topics. Over time you build a personal knowledge base that gets richer every session.
Built for your work
"The hardest part of a lit review is knowing what you don't know. Fieldnotes maps the contested claims, the methodological gaps, and the minority views — so your review covers the field, not just the consensus."
Students & PhD researchers
"You have a day to get across a market or topic you've never worked in. Fieldnotes gives you the debate map, the main schools of thought, and the unresolved questions — a structured briefing, not a summary."
Strategy & business professionals
"Before preparing a lecture or seminar, you need to know where the current debate actually sits — not just the textbook consensus. Fieldnotes surfaces the live tensions and the questions your students will push back on."
Faculty & academics
"Before you write, you need the evidence base mapped — strongest arguments, strongest counter-arguments, and what's still contested. Fieldnotes does that synthesis in minutes, so you spend your time writing, not searching."
Policy & advisory professionals
Everything you get
Written as a story, not read from bullet points. Hook, complication, disagreement, open question. Set your length and context — the energy adapts.
Strongest arguments for, strongest counter-arguments, and unresolved tensions — all sourced. Not just the consensus. The full intellectual landscape.
Every claim links to its source. See exactly what percentage traces to a specific paper versus broader synthesis. Honest about the difference.
Where the evidence is geographically concentrated, methodologically thin, or missing practitioner voices — Fieldnotes names it, explains why it matters.
Upload your interviews, transcripts, or field notes. Let your material anchor the narrative, with the global literature brought in to extend and challenge.
Take notes, tag insights, subscribe to topics. Get alerted when new evidence surfaces on the questions you're tracking.
Pricing
10 Fieldnotes a month on the free plan. No credit card. No expiry.
Free
Explore the product with no commitment.
Pro
For individuals who need the full picture.
Team
For small teams working from shared evidence.
Institutional
For think tanks, universities, and research orgs.
For institutions
Think tanks, universities, and research organisations use Fieldnotes to transform their publications into structured knowledge products — synthesised alongside global evidence, published on the platform, and shared with the audiences they're trying to reach.
Talk to us about an institutional pilotType a topic. Get the full picture — evidence, tensions, and the question worth sitting with — in the time you have.
Free to start. No credit card.
Cookie preferences
We use essential cookies to make Fieldnotes work. We'd also like to use analytics cookies to improve your experience.