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Show HN: Birds Near Me – Birding with citizen science

birdsnearme.com

31 pointsgerry_shaw17 comments

What a great idea. It sits quite well in the spot of giving people with a passing interest in birds, and nature in general, quite a decent amount of information. It might even be a gateway app, transforming casual users into full-time birders.

What I think might be missing is some form of call to action where people could engage with local groups or NGOs to find out about organized field trips and other events that would better inform people about a range of conservation issues and make them more aware of the world around them.

The work that the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is doing is pretty interesting. There are many online databases for recording bird sightings but as far as I know eBird is the only one with a strong focus on data quality and monitored by network of local volunteers that work as curators and moderators. They are also leaders in making the data open through their API which is generating a lot of useful projects and ideas.

http://ebird.org/content/ebird/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBird

https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/CLOISAPI/eBird+API+1....

Thanks for the compliment. This is just the 1.0 MVP release. I've got a number of ideas on the roadmap.

My intention was to build a birding app for the casual birder. Birds Eye covers the hard core birder market, I wanted something more approachable.

eBird is really great. It's amazing that it's been running for 10 years. It's really caught on in North America. I'm hoping with this app we will start to get more data around the world (localization is scheduled for the 1.1 release :)

I think there's a decent amount of latent interest in the environment in general and birds in particular since they are probably the most visible. The hard part is getting from somewhat interested to quite interested - that would make a big difference in environment issues - but that's hard to do unless you find out about local birds clubs, etc. which are really targeted at the serious/obsessed birder. Cornell do a reasonable job of engaging people's interest and the data available on eBird should help.

eBird adoption is growing here in Portugal - the main advantage is the moderation which is useful in keeping out the, shall we say, less reliable observations. As a result we see a decline in the use of other databases as people move to eBird.

I use the eBird API for www.birdinglisboa.com which provides a news service for birders in the Lisbon area.</shameless plug>

Nice! Is it open source?

FYI, me and three others developed one for plants as part of GovHack hackathon [1]. The information is sourced from Atlas of Living Australia database.

One of these days, I'll pick up the code and complete it :) Very time poor right now, unfortunately.

[1] - https://github.com/govhack-botaniser

Thanks! It's not open source at this time. I'm running it as a bit of an experiment and as a way to give back to all the people that have contributed in many ways (data, pictures, recordings, libraries) etc...

I had the initial version working in a couple of weeks and was using it quite a bit. It does take a lot of effort to finish all the loose ends. Hopefully you'll finish yours as well.

Very cool, thanks for sharing.

I would like something similar for Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies) to help with our local surveys

http://www.mndragonfly.org

There is a nice Odonata website/database, but it doesn't have API support like eBirds does

http://www.odonatacentral.org/index.php/PageAction.get/name/...

I've been meaning to build such an app but it hasn't made it to the top of my todo list yet.

I second hhandoko's question: is it open source? Or better yet, is it FLOSS? Also, is an Android version coming anytime soon?

One of my favourite projects to work on was with inaturalist.org . It's open sourced on github (https://github.com/inaturalist) .. we were making the New Zealand port : http://naturewatch.org.nz/

Has Android & iOS ports..

Those are nice projects, thanks for telling me about them!

It isn't open source but it will remain free. There is a similar Android app called Birds Around Me [1] that is very similar. I have no plans to implement on other devices. This is just a hobby. Ironically found after I built most of this app.

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sobremesa....

Yeah, I saw that on your support site after I asked. Sorry for not checking before, but thanks for answering!

I bet many people from the UK wouldn't click on this link since they'd think it's another crappy dating site.

Now that you mentioned it, it has similar context in Australia as well.

I dunno, "Birding with citizen science" might be quite an interesting dating site...

eBird is pretty much the definitive siting database. Interesting that its leveraging it. I'll try it out (maybe find some more birds for my flickr (which is inself a bad bird pun).

https://www.flickr.com/photos/acomjean

how does this compare to Birdseye? [1]

[1] http://www.birdseyebirding.com/

BirdsEye has a dedicated database so it can provide more accurate distributions but its limited to North America (there are other regions). BirdsEye is also a paid product.

If you are serious about birding it's worth checking out but poor UI IMO was the primary motivation for me to build this app.

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