BirdSpotter.org - Features Overview

This is a short discussion of the features that I wanted from a Birding application - somewhere to record my bird sightings and information about my birding trips and twitches. Even though I’d tried a few applications they never seemed to tick all the boxes. Mind you that was some years ago now so there may be newer applications available now that would fulfill all my desires; however this is to be a web based application and will have all the features that I want.

The basic requirement for a birders application (IMHO) is to record:

1. Bird species seen, with some ancilliary information such as numbers, gender, age, plumage etc
2. Locations of sightings

I’m pretty sure that all the applications I’ve tried in the past have been able to do this, they’d be pretty useless if they couldn’t. However that’s where a lot of them end. The basic features of BirdSpotter.org will extend these with these requirements:

• The ability to create a hierarchy, or ‘tree’, of birding sites so that the user can ‘drill down’ from a high level (e.g. their country) to a specific site or even part of a site. If you want to take this to an extreme you could create a hierarchy right down to the individual tree or bush. The level of detail in the site hierarchy will be entirely up to the end user and there will be no limit to the number of levels the user can create.
• The user will be able to produce reports of numbers and species seen at any level in the hierarchy of sites. For example clicking on a site will display all of the sightings for that site; but clicking on a country will roll-up all the sightings for all the sites within that country to give the user a country list.

I’ve a number of desirable features that I’d like to add at a later date. These include:

• Geocoding for site locations so that sites can be displayed on Google maps (or whatever mapping is chosen).
• Ability to upload your own photos of sites and birds.

I’m sure more features will occur to me as things go along and I’m hoping that ideas will be contributed from the birding public; but that’s it in a nutshell. If there’s features you’d like to see then please leave a comment and I’ll add them to the list.