Relational First
We build trust before we build tools—listening first, and working in partnership every step of the way.
Holistic, Transdisciplinary Thinking
Our team blends ecology, social science, ethnohistory, software, and planning to craft holistic, grounded solutions.
Community-Led
You set the pace and priorities. We follow your lead and support your decisions with care and flexibility.
Knowledge that Moves
We support knowledge flow between communities, researchers, and decision-makers—so insight leads to impact.
Neutral and Credible
We serve as a steady, professional presence in complex environments, facilitating with care, without taking sides. Our research is held to the highest standards of truth, neutrality, and accountability—built to be credible in both legal and community settings.
Our Core Offerings
We're not just a consulting and research firm, and we're not just a software company. We're fully both. Whether you need our consulting and research services, our software, or both, we are flexible to your needs.
Consulting and research services: custom, relational, respectful
Our consulting practice is built on trust, listening, and long-term relationships. We bring more than 20 years of experience supporting Indigenous-led research, mapping, and planning, and work closely with communities to design solutions that align with their laws, values, and goals.
In many cases, no best practices or tools existed for Indigenous-led research in environmental governance. So we built them—developing methodologies and frameworks that have since become models in the field.
Our consulting and research services include:
- Designing Indigenous-led research and monitoring frameworks
- Supporting Indigenous land use planning and spatial analysis
- Facilitating community engagement and cross-cultural dialogue
- Supporting data governance policy and protocols
- Producing expert reports for consultation, land claims, and negotiations
- Co-developing national and regional guidance frameworks for Indigenous data sovereignty and access
Our Outlook
Colonialism disrupted the relationships Indigenous Peoples have with their lands, waters, and knowledge systems. Today, Indigenous communities across Canada are restoring those connections — reclaiming data governance, revitalizing cultural practices, and asserting their inherent rights to steward territory according to their own laws, values, and priorities.
Yet Indigenous Knowledge is still sidelined in many environmental decisions, especially where narrow, quantitative frameworks fail to reflect lived experience, cultural knowledge, and long-term land-based observation. At the same time, challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, and unsustainable development are too complex for any single discipline or worldview to address alone.
Trailmark exists to help reconnect these threads. We support communities and collaborators in building relationships, tools, and strategies that bring diverse ways of knowing into decisions that shape land, water, and life.
In our Clients' Words
“The team is professional, competent, and dedicated to delivering services that meet the needs of communities. We are grateful for their ongoing guidance, in-kind support, and training over the years.”
"I had enough faith in the company that I got Trailmark to design our safe forage food app, which is now gaining traction in the forest industry and oil and gas industry.”
“Trailmark software is really one of a kind. It’s such a unique, useful tool for recording Traditional Ecological Knowledge and for interviewing elders. The people at Trailmark were really helpful assisting with our peer-reviewed interview process and being able to collect court defensible information and being able to store it over the long term.”
"We wanted something that would work for our communities that have varying levels of technical expertise. And we got it."
"I just really like the general demeanor of the staff that I’ve worked with from Trailmark. They come into meetings and they provide good information. They are helpful, respectful; they are really considerate. The attention to detail is really awesome. The commitment, amazing. All of that."
"Trailmark staff are very competent; they know what they’re doing. They have a lot of experience with different areas and different parts of the country. They are also very accessible every time I need something or need help with something."