To identify opportunities for developing software that is broadly applicable to the needs of the biodiversity community we carried out a user needs assessment coupled with an industry and market analysis. User needs were identified through a combination of in-depth interviews and web-based surveys, while the industry and market analysis was based on a review of more than 635 software offerings. The most notable feature of the biodiversity software development “industry” is its high degree of fragmentation and the large number of locally developed applications with small user bases. The top ten providers, based on software licenses, account for just 35% of the market’s estimated $15 million in addressable revenue. With an estimated 50,000 users split among government, NGO, academic, and for-profit segments, the biodiversity software community is very small compared with the 2 million users for GIS software products. Among the most frequent requests in the user needs assessment were applications for gathering and managing observational data, including hand-held field data input devices. Responding to the results of this survey NatureServe has begun developing a web-hosted application for observational data management—known as Kestrel—based on a newly developed provisional observation data standard. With support from the National Science Foundation, we are launching development of a handheld field data logger (or “BioPDA”) designed to apply contemporary geospatial data management concepts in support of digital field data capture.