Core Concepts

Local Wildlife

Seasonal species commonly observed near the coord.

One endpoint. Answers “what will guests see this time of year?” as a probability question, not a “what did someone see last week?” one.

Endpoint

Local Wildlife

Species commonly observed near the coord during the month of the stay window, aggregated across all years of citizen-science observation history. Self-gates when there are too few observations to be meaningful.

Why seasonal, not recent

Booking-page wildlife needs to answer “what will I see?” — a prediction. A “what was seen last week” feed is noisy, sparse in most places, and misleadingly specific (“Someone saw one starling yesterday” doesn’t mean much).

Chora queries a citizen-science observation network by month, aggregated across all years the platform has data for. The result: “in the area around your property, these are the species most commonly seen in mid-October.”

Coverage caveats

Citizen-science observation coverage varies wildly. Dense in the US, UK, Australia, core EU; sparse in most of Africa, Central Asia, parts of South America. When the query returns fewer than 5 species with meaningful frequency, we return applicable: false rather than a bad signal.

Example

const wildlife = await fetch(
  `/v1/pulse/wildlife?lat=${lat}&lng=${lng}&start=${start}&end=${end}`,
  { headers }
).then(r => r.json());
if (wildlife.applicable) {
  const topSpecies = wildlife.species.slice(0, 4);
  // Each: { common_name, scientific_name, photo_url, observation_count }
}

Data source

A citizen-science observation network — observation photos are per-observation licensed (usually CC-BY or CC0). Only public-domain and CC-licensed thumbnails are returned. See Attribution for the full source list.