Global Rare eBird

A map displaying rare bird sightings worldwide using eBird data.

About

Global Rare eBird retrieves and visualizes recent notable bird observations (i.e., rare species) reported via the eBird public API.

• 📍 Nearby Mode: Sightings within 50 km of your location (requires permission).
• 🌎 Region Mode: Sightings in a country or US state/CA province.

You can share the url link at any point or bookmark it to save your region's specific page! Press ⌘ Cmd + D (Mac) or Ctrl + D (Windows/Linux).

Spotted a bug or have a suggestion? Open a GitHub Issue.

Local setup

1. Install dependencies with npm install.
2. Copy .env.example to .env.local and set MAPBOX_ACCESS_TOKEN and EBIRD_API_KEY.
3. Start the app with npm run dev.

The GitHub Pages workflow injects the same MAPBOX_ACCESS_TOKEN and EBIRD_API_KEY names from repository secrets during the production build.

Taxonomy data

The repository separates raw source data from generated app data:

• Raw source files live in raw-data/
• Generated app data lives in data/

The taxonomy data is generated in five separate files:

• npm run generate:taxonomy
• npm run generate:region-catalog
• npm run generate:aba-taxonomy
• npm run generate:french-taxonomy
• npm run generate:german-taxonomy
• npm run generate:swiss-taxonomy
• npm run generate:taxonomies

The main taxonomy lookup is written to data/taxo.json as a compact code-keyed map with taxonomic order and category only.

The region catalog is written to data/region-catalog.json as a compact searchable list of countries, US states, and Canadian provinces used by the region picker.

The ABA checklist source lives in raw-data/ABA_Checklist-8.19.csv. The generated lookup is written to data/aba-taxonomy.json as a compact species-code status map and is only loaded when US or Canada regions are selected.

The French rarity committee table is scraped from https://www.chn-france.org/en/homologation/species/ and written to data/french-rarity-taxonomy.json as a compact species-code presence map. It is only loaded when France is selected.

The German checklist source lives in raw-data/meldeliste_d_ab2023_sys.csv. The generated lookup is written to data/german-taxonomy.json as a compact species-code status map. It is only loaded when Germany is selected.

The Swiss checklist source lives in raw-data/CH-Artliste_6.csv. The generated lookup is written to data/swiss-taxonomy.json as a compact species-code status map. It is only loaded when Switzerland is selected.

Run npm run generate:taxonomies after updating the source data or when you want to refresh all five generated files.