Birda's Explore Map - All you need to know

Birda’s Explore Map is designed to help you discover more birds, more easily, wherever you are. It brings together several key features, including the Nearby Species drawer, Birding Locations, New Species for You, Location search, and Next Targets so you always know which species to look for next.

The Nearby Species drawer shows all the species that can be seen at your current location when you open the app or tap the current location button. Within the drawer, you’ll find your logged species totals, the total number of species recorded there, your Next Targets, and a full list of species seen at that location.

At the top of the Nearby Species drawer, you’ll see a counter showing the number of species you’ve already seen and the total number of species that could be seen at your current location. See the section “How does it work?” below for more detail on how this location species list is calculated.

This feature helps you identify new species to target and understand how many likely species there are to spot, based on their probability of being seen (for example, “21 easy to spot”).

Below the species counter, you’ll find a carousel of Next Targets to spot. You can log them as sightings, scroll to view additional species, or tap on a card to navigate to the species guide to learn more.

The tag displayed on each species card in the carousel is linked to the species rarity score for that location. It represents the probability that the species could be seen there. The tags are shown as one of the following:

The 'Species' tab shows a list of species that have been seen at the location over the last decade to give users an indication of what they could see if they were to visit a location.

The 'New for you' tab helps users find locations that have species that they have not yet seen. We do this by overlaying a user's life list and the location species list to create a list of species that the user has not yet seen that are known to have been seen at a location. For this to work best, make sure that your life list in Birda is up to date by importing any of your previous sighting records via our import page.

In the top left corner of the Explore map you'll be able to search for new spots to go birding, making it even easier to locate new Birding locations that might uncover lifers to find.

Each species in the locations species lists are assigned a rarity score that is specific to the location. The score is from 0 to 9 with 0 being the least rare (most common) and 9 being the most rare (least common) for the location. The purpose of this score is to give users an indication of how common or rare any species is at any given location. So a bird species that may be considered very rare in a country could be considered relatively common at specific locations.

Birda makes use of users' sightings as well as over a billion open bird sighting records to populate the Explore map locations feature. Each sighting record is assigned to its closest location as long as it is within a specific radius of the location. We also have a sighting limit threshold which excludes locations with very few sighting records. This helps us only show popular birding locations where there has been significant birding activity in the past.

New sightings from Birda's users and external sources are fed into the database monthly. We anticipate this will be improved to daily updates in the future.

Some locations may have just enough sighting records to be included as a location but not enough for the list to accurately account for all the species (and their rarity) that are likely to occur at a location.

Some locations may be situated on private property so please respect the laws and regulations of the country that you are based in.

GBIF.org (18 July 2023) GBIF Occurrence Download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.7kaa23