eBird Polygon Tool (1 Viewer)

Ever since late 2006, I've wanted to be able to view the eBird data within a user-specified polygon or circle. Especially given where I live. Los Angeles County is enormous, and has a great diversity of habitats, and I really wanted to be able to view data at a more local level. eBird made it possible to view data either for a hotspot, or an entire county, but nothing between. (It was also possible to select a set of hotspots from a huge list, but that only includes hotspots, not user-defined locations, and is sorted alphabetically instead of geographically making it rather cumbersome.)

Finally I decided to write my own tool implementing this functionality.
Here it is: http://ebird-tools.thruhere.net/polygon.html

This tool uses the entire database of locations, not just hotspots. The enumeration of locations inside the polygon is done on the server my tool is running on, not on eBird's server. The tool then returns an eBird Bar Chart URL that allows you to view the data inside that polygon. Due to a limitation on the eBird server side, Bar Chart URLs are limited to 50 locations, so if more than 50 are found within a polygon, my tool uses just the 50 with the highest checklist counts. Another limitation is that the list of locations is from a Nov 2014 snapshot of the eBird database, which is updated quarterly; but since the URLs returned by the tool point to eBird's server, only the location list will be from Nov 2014 — the bar chart data will be current.

I would very much appreciate feedback and suggestions. I'd also appreciate any suggestions on other places to post about this.

EDIT: Site was down for an unknown number of hours, but is back up now.

Thought I'd bump this in case it'd be useful to anybody who hasn't seen it yet.

Also, some feedback would be helpful. I was expecting a bigger response when I released it.

1. Is it that the tool, as it currently is, is too hard to use?
   1a. Would it help to integrate a polygon-drawing interface with the tool, instead of requiring that you use a separate page or app to create the polygon?
   1b. Would it help to show ebird hotspots/locations in the map upon which the user draws their polygon?
   Note that feedback will make me much more likely to implement improvements sooner. As it is now, I'm not sure if I've simply not publicized the tool well enough, or if hardly anybody needs it.
   
2. Is it that you'd prefer an app that runs on your own computer, instead of a web page that processes the data on a remote server?
   
3. Does it not run well enough on tablets / smartphones?
   
4. Is it simply that there's far less of a demand for seeing the data in a polygon that I would have guessed?
   4a. Do people not even explore ebird data very much? Tons of people submit checklists to ebird regularly, so is it just that they care more about submitting data than seeing it?
   4b. Are the vast majority of ebird users only interested in exploring data for the purpose of chasing rarities, or some other limited use, not for seeing quantitative data on the ebb and flow of all species within a given area?
   4c. Do plenty of people use the Bar Charts feature, and just don't realize (or mind) that viewing only one hotspot (instead of everything within a polygon) results in leaving out a lot of data?
   
5. Is there a better place to post the announcement of this tool?

works well for me using the Google maps instructions, on my nexus7 tablet. Thanks for sharing it, I'm sure it will be useful.

peter.jones said:

works well for me using the Google maps instructions, on my nexus7 tablet. Thanks for sharing it, I'm sure it will be useful.

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Wow, I'm both surprised and pleased to hear it works well on a tablet. I guess my Asus TF700T is showing its age. (I kind of assumed when releasing the polygon tool that, in its current form at least, it would only work well when used from a computer.)

Just had a play with this, and even such a tech-duffer as me managed to get it to work (after a few goes). E-bird seems to be of limited value in a European context, but for planning visits to the states I can see this being a really useful tool. Great work!

Cheers

James

I think eBird could easily become a worldwide tool if more people submitted to it!

Ebird seems to be pretty good already in Portugal, and there are a few people using it in Serbia. Most other European countries already have their own country-solutions, something that only results in problems when you cross the country border.

More collaboration between these country solutions with each other or with ebird would be a good thing

Niels

Eremeaea managed to integrate (though in the process lost of all my effort data for all of my checklists) so it would be nice to see other organizations do the same eventually.

I took the liberty of sending a link to this thread to a group of people more involved with ebird including the leadership. So far the feedback is positive.

Niels

Marshall Iliff (eBird Project Leader) included this in the eBird-regional-editors list serve on February 23. I don't know if it specifically relates to your work above.
"One of our planned developments in the near future is to make use of polygons. In this way, we would begin to define hotspots as polygons (i.e., draw their borders on a map), would have a tool to start creating hotspot structure (megahotspots and microhotspots, defined by polygons not by names as we do it currently). As part of that, we would hope to have tools to aggregate points in the way you describe (data output for all "downtown" hotspots).
The previous correspondence he referring to was small parks in the cities that had become hotspots of their own. He seemed to be wanting to avoid this for the moment. Anyways. I like the idea overall. and have been wanting something to pick up the gaps between "hotspots" Those who are birders, never stop just because they aren't at the premium location. How else am I going to find flying accipiters. Seems they only occur when I'm traveling at a higher rate of speed. ;-)

David,
Well done. I have forwarded this email to the eBird users in the Australian Capital Territory and one response from a very happy user is 'I hope the developer of this facility gets the glory he deserves.'

Personally I have had an unsuccessful play, but will keep trying. In the ACT we activity discourage the user of personal sites in favour of hotspots (a hang over from our system pre eBird), so this tool, while very important is not necessarily as essential as it is in the US.

I suggest you get in touch directly with the eBird leadership at Cornell.

Alastair

David:

I just came across your work here. i was led here via the eBird Reviewers group. (thanks Niels)

The tool works fine. I think people just haven't come across it yet. Probably because BirdForum tends to be a bit more continental and eBird tends to be a bit more new world.

I'll push it out a bit further. It's a nice piece of work and i'm pretty sure many would find it very useful.

greg haworth
portland oregon

David,

This tool is very nice! Thank you for taking the time to create it and share it! I have tested it out and found it to be quite fun to see all the extra data that I had no way of finding before. Thanks!

David, I finally got around to work with your wonderful tool a few times. The frustrations I have do not have anything to do with you, but everything to do with google earth and google map being imprecise with birding locations. obviously, birding is not the main reason for existence of google

Niels

eBird vs. the Swedish Artportalen

Pardon late reply. Found this thread via a search.

To the eBird people, and to anyone interested in using shapes on maps to define viewing locations, and, indeed, to anyone interested in numerous amazing features, I encourage you to look at:

http://www.artportalen.se.

(You have to click on the tiny flag in the top right to get English.)

Play around with the site for 10 minutes. It's amazing.

I wrote to both Artportalen and eBird encouraging them to collaborate in some way (for example, allowing easier porting of data between the two databases), but, surprisingly, got no response from either. It seems obvious that eBird could learn from the amazing strengths of Artportalen, and Artportalen could learn from the smooth interface and global aspirations of eBird.

In any event, I'm in Sweden now, and trying to figure out where to enter my data. I'd been using eBird, but I'm now wondering whether that might not be the best choice for Sweden.

Brian

David,

Thank you, thank you. It is a wonderful tool and is helping us with our survey work of some areas here in Missouri.

I would like to make sure I understand what you said. The bar chart information is from the current eBird database. Is that correct?

Is there a way to update the eBird database you use for creating the output list? It could be very helpful.

Again, thanks so much for your work

Scott Laurent

Updated eBird Polygon Tool

Scott,

I am glad to hear my tool has been helpful to you (and to others).

You are right, I had not updated the database since April 2015. I have finally done so, and, eBird allowing, will keep doing so quarterly (i.e., as often as the database is updated).

There was actually also a bug in which the bar chart URLs linked by my program used the year range 1900-2015, instead of 1900 to the current year. I have fixed this also. (The workaround before this fix would have been to use the "Change Date" button on the bar chart page, or to edit the URL yourself.) With the fix now, and with the workaround before, the bar chart information resulting from use of the polygon tool is indeed up-to-date, with only the set of locations being limited to potentially out-of-date information.


Brian,

I took a quick look at the polygon functionality of http://www.artportalen.se. It's very nice that this site has integrated the polygon drawing, as opposed to my approach which relies on use of external programs/pages to create the polygon. However I am critical of its interface for drawing the polygon; it's much worse than the two methods I have linked from my polygon tool page. It doesn't let you edit a polygon you've drawn (you must start from scratch), and the map viewport is fixed in size and can't be resized to take advantage of the user's screen resolution.

I plan to do similar integration for my polygon tool, but intend to implement it with a better and more responsive user interface.


Best regards,
David

Needs Polygon

Hello David,

I just came across you Polygon tool, and absolutely love it!!!! I always wondered why it didnt exist. No I have a question, and this is probably something you have already thought about.

Would it be possible to make a polygon tool to generate a needs list like it exists in eBird for states and countries already? I would just LOVE to be able to generate needs list for a polygon area!!!!

David,

Belated thanks for your amazing efforts!! I'm amazed more eBirders (or birders in general) don't know about this. It's incredibly useful.

There's no way to get more frequent "snapshots" of the eBird database? (I may be revealing my ignorance of how all this works....)

Again, thanks.

I agree, by the way, that Artportalen's solution is suboptimal.

Best,
Brian

Bumping this to show people who may not know about it that the eBird Polygon Tool exists.

I've made several improvements to it since starting this thread. Most significantly, because eBird removed the 50 location limit on barchart queries, I added support for specifying the maximum number of locations, up to 1500. The actual number of locations returned depends on how many can fit within the maximum URL length, but for non-enormous polygons, it can often return all locations rather than just the top ones. See the changelog for the full list of changes.

Also, be aware that there is a bug in eBird's bar chart functionality, where if you are logged on to eBird, the types of bar chart URLs returned by the Polygon Tool (which include not just hotspots, but personal locations as well) will usually fail to load properly, and show only a tiny subset of the data (or even a completely empty bar chart). I reported this bug to eBird support back in Aug 2018 but they did not reply, and did not fix the bug. So to make proper use of the Polygon Tool, you should either be logged off eBird or use a Private/incognito browser window.

BrianInStockholm said:

There's no way to get more frequent "snapshots" of the eBird database?

Click to expand...

Since Oct 2018, eBird has been archiving their database once a month (instead of the previous 4 times per year) and I have been taking advantage of this to update the Polygon Tool's location database once a month.

rolandrumm said:

Would it be possible to make a polygon tool to generate a needs list like it exists in eBird for states and countries already? I would just LOVE to be able to generate needs list for a polygon area!!!!

Click to expand...

This would not be possible given the way the tool currently works. It would have to be interfaced with your eBird account, whereas currently it has no knowledge of which user you are and does not connect directly to eBird's site (rather, leaving it up to you to open the URLs it provides).

One way this could almost work would for a browser extension to do the following two queries:

1. Your list of target species (which could come from a query to eBird's existing Target Species function, over an area that is a superset of the desired polygon)
2. The output of the bar chart query from following the URL provided by the existing Polygon Tool.

This browser extension would parse the data from these two queries, and create a page (that mimics the Target Species results page) containing an intersection of the species contained both in the Target Species result and the bar chart result. This wouldn't be correct though, which is why I said almost. Since the Target Species query would have to be done to an area that is a superset of the polygon, it will omit species that you have seen within the larger area (e.g. county) but have not seen in the polygon (e.g. local patch).

The only way this could truly work (short of eBird integrating polygon functionality) is for a locally executed tool to take the data returned by eBird's Download my Data function (you'd have to manually give it the MyEBirdData.csv file you received over email), intersect that with the desired polygon and time period, and invert the resulting list of species. You'd have to re-download your eBird data via the "Download my Data" function every time you wanted an up-to-date polygon needs list. It wouldn't need any location database, because the latitude and longitude data is already in the MyEBirdData.csv file; it'd only need a species database. Would anybody be interested in a tool that does this?

slaurent said:

The bar chart information is from the current eBird database. Is that correct?

Click to expand...

Correct. The list of locations in the bar chart URL is from a snapshot of the eBird database (which, as of the more frequent updates, can be anywhere from 15 to 52 days out-of-date), but the bar chart itself is from the current database.