Announcing Birdwave

I'm happy to announce a side project I've been working on with some of my colleagues here at Neo: Birdwave. An app to visualize bird migrations across the US region, Birdwave falls at the intersection of several different personal and professional interests for me.

Birds

Even if you aren't an aspiring birder like me, it's hard not to be fascinated by how these tiny creatures cover hundreds of miles each year on barely any food or rest.

Big Data

eBird.org collects crowdsourced reports of sightings of various species of birds all over the world, and provide the data freely for non-commercial use. Just the reported sightings for the US region from December 2012 through November 2013 turned out to be a whopping 20 gigabytes of data, consisting of 29.6 million data points across over 1700 species of birds.

Data Visualization with d3js

I've already written about choropleths as a data visualization technique and how d3 is amazing at handling it.

The Clojure Stack

This consisted of:

Using Clojure and Datomic on the back-end made the large amount of data more manageable to serve up as an API.

ReactJS and Om

As a data-driven app, Birdwave's front-end lent itself really well to be structured as a set of Om components.

Go Try It Out!

We'll be posting more about some of our learnings while building this app. In the meanwhile, please try out the app and let us know what we can do to improve it. Here are some good species to check out:

For more detail on how to use the app, take a look at the "How this works" section at the bottom of the page.

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