About

An open map of wildlife records for Taiwan, run by a nonprofit team of high school students who are passionate about wildlife conservation. We are not a government agency. Anyone can file a report: roadkill or an injured animal, an invasive species, or a wildlife sighting. Many of the records here were collected by 路殺社 (TaiRON) volunteers and released under CC BY 4.0.

1. 1

   Photograph it and send a report

   Take a photo, mark the place on the map and send it. It takes about a minute and needs no account. Before anything is uploaded, your browser shrinks the photo and removes the location and camera details hidden inside it.

2. 2

   Name it, or leave it to us

   If you know the animal, name it. If you're not sure, say so, and our identification model tries to work it out from your photo. Until an animal is identified, its location is only ever shown blurred, because it might be a protected species. Reports without a photo are checked by a person before they appear.

3. 3

   It goes on the public map

   Every public record is on the open map, in the list of records and in the statistics. Protected and sensitive species are shown only as a blurred area, never an exact spot.

Publishing the exact location of a protected species would be drawing a map for poachers. So for those species the public map shows a deliberately blurred location, a square about 10 km or 50 km across, never the real spot, and the most sensitive are not shown on the map at all. Which species are blurred, and by how much, follows the sensitivity rating in the Taiwan species checklist (TaiCOL), which is Taiwan's own list of species at risk from poaching; every species protected by law is blurred as well, rated or not. When the two disagree, the stricter one wins. A record whose species has not been named yet is blurred too, until it is. Invasive species are not blurred. GBIF, eBird and iNaturalist protect such records in the same way.

Until we know what an animal is, we cannot tell whether it is a protected species: it might be a leopard cat. So a report with no species name is never shown at its exact location. It is either held back until it has been identified, or shown at a blurred location.

Every public record here can be browsed on the map, in the list and in the statistics. The imported records are 路殺社 (TaiRON)'s open roadkill records for 2011–2017, shared under CC BY 4.0, and species names come from the Taiwan species checklist (TaiCOL). We plan to share the reports made here as open data too.

File a report: it takes about a minute and needs no account. If you sign in, you can see the reports you have filed and where each one has got to.

Questions, corrections, or collaboration — write to the team.