How to use birdwatching planner.

Birdwatching planner is a tool to group together eBird alerts and figure out where to go birding next time. It assigns each alert to its geographic zone and produces an easy-to-read CSV with all alerts and their respective zones. This way you can see, which area is the best to visit next.

1. First of all, some preparation:

    gem install nokogiri
    gem install fastercsv
    gem install yaml
    gem install clipper
   

2. Then you need a map with regions you are interested in. Google maps work great for this. Here's an example of our map for Bay Area: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=202933467189883314896.00049912d6823abb690f2&ll=37.637072,-122.276459&spn=0.494809,1.126099&t=h&z=10

   You can create your own map and draw your regions on it. The planner will collect all alerts within each region.

3. When you are done, you will need a KML file for that map. Look for KML link above the map on the right. Copy the URL. It should look something like this: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&t=h&msa=0&output=kml&msid=202933467189883314896.00049912d6823abb690f2

4. Now we can generate our landmarks file from this feed. Run:

    ruby google_map_to_landmarks.rb "Your KML URL >landmarks.yml
   

   e.g.

    ruby google_map_to_landmarks.rb http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&t=h&msa=0&output=kml&msid=202933467189883314896.00049912d6823abb690f2 >landmarks.yml
   

5. Create the list of counties that you are interested in. See counties.yml for an example.

6. Now we need the alerts from eBird. Login to eBird.org and go to http://ebird.org/ebird/alerts. Choose your state and click view. Save this page as HTML only. In Chrome, choose File/Save as. Then choose "Web Page, HTML only". Say, you saved it to alerts_05_jan_2011.html. You can also choose "view source" and copy all the text into a text editor, then save it.

7. Now we can run the planner:

   ruby birdwatching_planner.rb alerts_05_jan_2011.html landmarks.yml counties.yml >birds.csv

This created a CSV (birds.csv) with all alerts nicely grouped by the regions that we outlined on the google map. Open it with Excel and have fun!

Happy birdwatching!