Open data
Versioned files for research and teaching: weekly records per species on a 5 degree grid, the observation effort behind them, and seasonal arrival dates. Built only from records their publishers released under CC0 or CC BY 4.0 through GBIF, so you may reuse them under CC BY 4.0 with credit.
Latest release: 7 October 2026
Weeks 6 Oct 2025 to 21 Sep 2026 · methods 0.12 · DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23206867
- weekly_records.csv: 376,243 rows (week, cell, class, species, records)
- effort.csv: 16,874 rows (all records of a class per cell and week)
- arrivals.csv: 4,693 rows (arrival, peak and departure week per species and cell)
- taxa.csv: 17,549 species with their GBIF species keys (every file carries the key: join on it, not on names)
- datasets.csv: 284 contributing GBIF datasets with DOIs, for citation
Release 2: GBIF species keys on every row, taxa.csv, and reproducibility notes.
Earlier releases
- 6 October 2026: zip, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23193454
What is in it
- Birds, bats, amphibians and insects; human and machine observations with coordinates and no geospatial issues.
- Counts are records, not animals. Use effort.csv to turn them into shares and to judge coverage: Wildlife Network treats a cell-week as watched by observers at 100 bird records (20 for other classes).
- Arrival dates follow the rule on the methods page, applied to these records alone.
- The last two weeks are left out because GBIF receives records late.
What is not in it
BirdWeather acoustic detections. They power much of the live map with BirdWeather's agreement, but redistribution has not been agreed, so they are not in any release or bulk download.
Citing
Cite the release you used by its DOI (to refer to the data in general, the DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23193453 always points to the newest release), and the GBIF datasets listed in datasets.csv as GBIF asks (GBIF citation guidelines). Each release folder has a CITATION.cff file.
Live access
For current figures use the open API (documentation and R and Python examples): /api/v1/coverage (who watches each cell), /api/v1/arrivals?species=…&format=csv, /api/v1/species/…/movement. API responses mix sources and are for viewing; for analysis, use the releases.