🦇 About

Nature this week

Nature this week helps people notice what is happening outdoors around them right now: Animal activity and other nature events tied to location, season, time of day, and weather.

How this works

This site combines species distribution and seasonal timing information with descriptions and images from public data sources, primarily iNaturalist and Wikipedia. The information is gathered in several steps.

Species distributions

The world is divided into large geographic regions using the H3 geospatial indexing system. For each of the 5,882 cells of resolution 2 (which have a radius of about 150 km), the most commonly observed species of each group (mammals, birds, insects, etc.) are obtained through the iNaturalist API. The hexagonal region you are currently viewing is highlighted on the map. (For some species which are e.g. endemic to tiny islands, additional latitude/longitude limits are set on their respective events in a later step.)

Seasonal timing

The iNaturalist API also provides histogram data for each species. This is especially useful for species with yearly life cycles such as butterflies, whose larval and adult phases are associated with clear observation peaks in the histograms. For widely distributed species, timing data is analyzed separately for tropical regions and for the non-tropical parts of the northern and southern hemispheres.

For long-lived animals such as mammals, observation histograms are less reliable indicators of activity. In these cases, additional information such as mating seasons or birth periods is extracted from their respective Wikipedia articles.

Extra conditions

Many events depend on environmental conditions. For example, butterflies rarely fly in cold or windy weather, and bats are primarily active at night. Such conditions are applied automatically based on species groups and, when available, refined using information from Wikipedia.

Events are shown only if the species occurs in the selected region, the timing matches the current week, and the current weather conditions are suitable. Weather information is obtained from Open-Meteo.

Descriptions

Event descriptions are adapted from Wikipedia articles. Sections about behaviour or life cycles are usually the most interesting, although in case of article stubs, it is sometimes necessary to fall back to the general species description.

Photos

Photos are manually selected for each event from images available on Wikimedia and iNaturalist.

Limitations

The events shown here are estimates based on observation data and general biological knowledge. As such, they are approximate.

Seasonal timing: Event timings reflect typical seasonal patterns. In years with unusual weather, e.g. particularly warm or cold springs, real activity will probably occur earlier or later than shown. Some events include temperature conditions which should help to reduce this effect.

Geographic resolution: Species presence is estimated using geographic cells with a radius of roughly 150 km. This relatively coarse resolution was chosen to avoid overloading the iNaturalist API and because many species do not have enough observations to support much finer spatial precision; but this also means that not every shown species will be present in your immediate surroundings.

Observation bias: The system relies heavily on iNaturalist observations. As a result, commonly observed species are better represented than rare or difficult-to-detect ones.