Zoos · Rehabilitation · Sanctuaries · Rescues
A keeper finds the animal, taps a category, adds a note and a photo, and saves. About thirty seconds, standing where the animal is - with or without a signal. Everything else in ARK exists to serve that half minute.
Screenshot pending
Log capture, mid-flow
The capture sheet open on an animal profile: category chips, the note field with a real sentence typed in it, the photo thumbnail attached, Save primed.
390 x 844, light mode
The problem
Not because anyone is disorganised. Because the place the observation happens and the place the record lives are two different places, and the gap between them is bridged by hand.
At the enclosure
A whiteboard, a clipboard or a paper log. Wild Welfare's own husbandry training tells facilities to keep a daily board at the section and transfer it into the permanent record afterwards.3
Later that day
Someone types it up. AZA's 2026 accreditation standards still accommodate paper systems and require daily records to be entered the same day, or by the end of the next working day.4
Then again
A registrar reviews the keeper's entries and accepts or rejects them - the standard division of labour Species360's own documentation describes.5
And once more
At reporting time, the year gets transcribed again into whatever the permitting agency wants.
Peer-reviewed, not anecdotal
“Data on these handwritten logs… were manually transcribed into digital spreadsheets.”
The same study reports what the copying costs. Errors and inconsistencies occurred “both within and between rehabilitation centers” - misidentified species, missing causes of distress, missing final dispositions - and incomplete records had to be dropped before anything could be analysed.1
Nearly three decades of state records existed and still could not answer basic questions, because they “were collected, but were not in a form conducive for such data summaries.”1
Ask a rehabilitator how a year of intake sheets becomes a spreadsheet and you get the same picture from the inside: it gets typed in, one sheet at a time, and it is “tedious” right up until the moment the data finally tells you something.2
The entry that is never made at all does not show up in any of these numbers. It is usually the biggest one.
How it works
ARK is built around a single loop. Every other feature hangs off it, and nothing is allowed to make it slower.
Search by name, microchip, band, case number or enclosure. Or open the enclosure you are standing in front of and pick from who lives there.
Your organization's categories, not ours. Feeding, behaviour, treatment, enrichment - whatever your team already says out loud.
One line is a complete record. The photo comes straight from the camera. What you observed and when you observed it are stored separately from when you typed it.
It is in the permanent record, attributed to you, searchable, and visible to whoever walks in next. Nobody types it a second time.
When the network is not there
We are not going to tell you that dead spots at enclosures are this sector's great unsolved problem, because we could not find anyone saying so. What facilities do report is the ordinary kind of outage: the site's internet goes down for an afternoon and work carries on regardless.
So ARK treats the network as optional rather than assumed. A note, a photo, a weight or a feeding is written on the device and queued. When a connection returns it syncs, and because every capture carries an id the device generated, a retry is acknowledged as the entry you already made rather than filed as a second one.
Offline capture is on every plan, including Starter. It is insurance, and insurance you only get on the expensive tier is not insurance.
Screenshot pending
Captured offline, waiting to sync
An animal profile in airplane mode with a just-saved log carrying the pending-sync chip, and the offline indicator visible in the app chrome.
390 x 844, light mode, airplane mode on
What it records
Everything below exists in the product today. Where something needs a particular plan, it says so on the card rather than in a footnote.
Screenshot pending
The animal profile, on a desk
A full animal profile at desk width: identity header with identifiers and status, the provenance timeline, the weight trend chart with real points, and the recent log stream. Use a seeded animal with a year of history, not a fresh record.
1680 x 1050, light mode
One record per animal or per group, with the identifiers a registrar actually needs and a provenance timeline that keeps its real dates.
The 30-second entry the whole product is built around: a categorized note, a photo, and a timestamp that means the moment it was observed.
Weights on an animal, water chemistry on a tank. The same machinery, because a reading belongs to an enclosure and not to a separate module.
What was offered, what happened to it, and whether the refusals are becoming a pattern.
Work that recurs, assigned or not, and visible to whoever walks in next.
A record-keeping module, deliberately not a clinical system. No dosing calculators, no diagnostics.
A rubric your organization owns, seeded from the Five Domains model, scored 1-5 in five taps.
Permits, intake forms, lab results and transfer paperwork, attached where they belong.
The paperwork that has to be produced rather than browsed, generated from the records you already keep.
Areas, sections and enclosures, restructured by dragging - and history that survives the restructure.
For the volunteer who was last here on Sunday and needs to know what changed.
Import is data exit's twin, and neither is ever paywalled. Both work on every plan, including an expired trial.
Standards and compliance
AZA, the Zoological Association of America and the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries each require an accredited member to keep an animal records system. None of them requires a particular vendor. What they want is that the records exist, that they are current, and that you can produce them.
AZA's standards expect daily records entered the same day or by the end of the next working day. That is a much easier bar to clear when the entry is made where the observation happened, rather than from a whiteboard at nine that evening.4
An annual inventory by species with every acquisition and disposition in the period. A transfer form with identity, identifiers, provenance, medical summary and live permits. A care sheet for the enclosure door. CSV and XLSX.
Every change writes an audit row: who, what, when, and what the value was before. Deletion is soft, so a record that was removed can still account for itself. On every plan, including Starter.
How long you have to keep it
The spread is wider than any single number a vendor can put on a page. Licensed exhibitors under the Animal Welfare Act keep records for one year after an animal is disposed of or dies, longer where other law applies. Federal migratory bird rehabilitation permits require five years. State schedules differ again.7 ARK never deletes on a schedule of its own - deletion is soft and the audit trail keeps the story - so the retention question stays yours to answer against the rules that actually bind you.
When your annual report is due
California, Washington and New York each have their own form and their own deadline, and they do not agree with each other.9 We are not going to publish a fifty-state table we cannot stand behind. What ARK gives you is the underlying data - dated, attributable and exportable - whichever form you are the one filling in.
The bet
Most of what a records system does is settled. These are the places ARK is deliberately built differently, and each one is a structural choice rather than a feature we could add or drop next quarter.
01
This sector runs on volunteers, students, weekend keepers and one person who comes in on Tuesdays. Software that prices by user teaches an organization to share a login, and a shared login destroys the one thing a record needs: knowing who wrote it.
ARK's limits are active animals and storage. That is the entire list. There is no seat cap anywhere in the product, on any plan, which is why the pricing table below says unlimited users four times and means it literally.
02
The incumbents are not standing still here, and we are not going to tell you they have no mobile support - ZIMS shipped mobile data entry with QR codes at the enclosure in May 2026. The difference is which end the system was designed from.
ARK was built phone-first and then given a desk view, so the fast path is the one you take standing up. Nothing in it is a cut-down version of a screen that lives somewhere else.
“While not all modules are fully supported on mobile… For the best experience, we still recommend using a desktop for more complex tasks.”
03
Most of the cost of changing records systems is not the subscription. It is the migration nobody has time for. So the import wizard is free, admin-run, and never paywalled: upload a CSV or a spreadsheet, map the columns, see a full preview of what would be created, and only then commit.
It ships with documented recipes for AnimalCare and ZIMS exports, and it is safe to run twice - a row that already exists is skipped and says so, matched on the strongest identifier it has. Fix the three bad rows, upload the same file again, and nothing duplicates.
Pricing
Two things are metered: how many animals are in your care right now, and how much space your photos and files take. Nothing else.
Home-based rehabilitators and small rescues.
$19per month
Includes
Working rehabilitation centres and sanctuaries.
$49per month
Everything in Starter, plus
Zoos, aquariums and multi-site operations.
$129per month
Everything in Standard, plus
Institutions with procurement and an IT department.
Custom
Everything in Pro, plus
An archived animal never counts against your cap. A rehabilitation centre with four hundred intakes a year and thirty patients today is a thirty-animal facility. We are not going to build a product that gives you a reason to leave an animal out of the record.
Every new organization gets thirty days with Pro features and trial-sized storage. If the trial lapses and nothing is chosen, the organization goes read-only: new capture stops, and reading, searching, printing and exporting everything already recorded carries on indefinitely.
Commitments
A features list tells you what a company is selling today. This tells you what it will still refuse to do when it needs the revenue. Every line here is enforced by how the product is built, not by a policy page.
This work runs on volunteers. Pricing that counts them punishes exactly the organizations that need the records most, and it teaches a rescue to share one login. Our caps are active animals and storage. There is no seat limit anywhere in the product.
A sanctuary's terminal outcome is lifetime care and a rehabilitation centre's is release. Billing on adoptions taxes an event half this sector never has, and the half that does have it should not pay more for a good day.
If you downgrade, or your trial lapses, or your card fails, new entries stop. Reading, searching, printing and exporting everything you have ever recorded does not. An expired organization goes read-only, never dark.
CSV takeout of your animals and your logs is on every plan and carries no feature flag. So is the import wizard. Leaving is not a billable event.
One number per tier. No configurator, no line items to reconcile, no discovering at renewal that the thing you use daily was optional.
There are no logos on this page and no testimonials, because ARK has no customers yet. When there are numbers worth publishing we will publish the real ones, starting from whatever they actually are.
Your data
Every request resolves your membership before it touches a row. Another organization's animal does not come back as forbidden; it comes back as not found, because as far as your session is concerned it does not exist. The database enforces the same rule underneath as a second net.
Mutations write an audit row - who, what, when, and the values before and after. Records are soft-deleted rather than erased, so something that was removed can still account for itself. Auditing is not a paid feature.
CSV takeout of your animals and your logs is on every plan and carries no feature flag, and it keeps working after a trial lapses. Pro adds API tokens if you would rather pull it programmatically.
The paywall is attached to creating new records. It is not attached to reading, searching, printing or exporting the ones you already have, and it never will be - a rescue that cannot pay this month still has to be able to look up what an animal was treated with last week.
An image without its record is unreachable and a record without its image is a broken page, so the files and the database are treated as one backup unit rather than two schedules that can drift apart.
There is no analytics business hiding behind the subscription. The subscription is the business model, which is exactly why it is priced to be payable.
Placeholder - not yet live
When there are real totals here they will be the real ones, published from the running system and dated. Until an organization is actually using ARK, the honest number is none, so that is what this says.
Get in touch
ARK is not open for self-serve signup, and there is no demo environment to click through. If you run a facility and any of this sounded like your Tuesday, write to us. Tell us what you keep records in today and roughly how many animals are in your care, and we will tell you straight whether ARK is ready to be useful to you yet.
A person reads it. You will not be added to a sequence.
Sources
Everything above that is a statement about the world rather than about ARK is numbered and listed here. Where we could not verify a source, the claim was cut rather than softened.
Hanson M, Hollingshead N, Schuler K, Siemer WF, Martin P, Bunting EM. Species, causes, and outcomes of wildlife rehabilitation in New York State. PLOS ONE. 2021;16(9):e0257675. 58,185 cases across the three reporting years ending 2012, 2013 and 2014. The study describes archived paper records and handwritten logs, states that “Data on these handwritten logs… were manually transcribed into digital spreadsheets”, notes that decades of collected data “were collected, but were not in a form conducive for such data summaries”, and records that “reporting errors and inconsistencies both within and between rehabilitation centers occurred”, ranging from spelling errors to misidentified species to failure to report distress causes and final disposition.
International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council, “Keeping Your Data Straight”, on transcribing a year of paper intake sheets into a spreadsheet: “Tedious for sure, but quite amazing once all that data was entered and we suddenly saw that 70% of our waterfowl came from Oshkosh…”. The same article surveys the systems rehabilitators actually use, pen and paper among them.
Wild Welfare, husbandry and record-keeping training material for zoos and sanctuaries, which instructs facilities to keep a daily whiteboard or noticeboard at the section and transfer its contents into the permanent animal record.
Association of Zoos and Aquariums, Accreditation Standards and Related Policies, 2026 edition. The animal records standards accommodate paper systems alongside electronic ones and require that daily records be entered the same day or by the end of the next working day.
Species360 ZIMS documentation describing the standard division of labour in which keepers enter observations and a registrar reviews, accepts or rejects them before they become part of the permanent record.
Species360 ZIMS documentation on mobile support: “While not all modules are fully supported on mobile… For the best experience, we still recommend using a desktop for more complex tasks.” ZIMS added mobile data entry with QR codes at the enclosure in May 2026.
Record retention periods vary by the authority you hold. Licensed exhibitors under the Animal Welfare Act keep records for one year after an animal is disposed of or dies (9 CFR 2.80), longer where other law applies; federal migratory bird rehabilitation permits require five years (50 CFR 21.76). State schedules differ again. Check the ones that bind you rather than trusting a vendor's number.
AZA, the Zoological Association of America and the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries each require accredited members to maintain an animal records system. None of them requires a specific vendor's software.
Annual reporting deadlines that are confirmed: California, 14 CCR 679, form DFW 486, due 31 January; Washington, WAC 220-450-130, due 31 January; New York, Department of Environmental Conservation rehabilitator log, due 1 December. Other states differ and several could not be verified.
OERCA lists per-user pricing, quoted publicly at $110 per month for five users plus a $250 setup fee. Tracks Software prices by full-time equivalent staff. Both figures were taken from the vendors' own published pricing.
Sources without a link are cited by name, section and date because we did not have a URL we were confident would still resolve. Nothing here is quoted beyond what the source actually says; where a phrase appears in quotation marks, it is the source's wording and not a paraphrase of it.