Lintuatlas aka Finnish Breeding Bird Atlas is the flagship of longitudinal observations on avian fauna in Finland. And it’s not just one atlas but many. The first covers years 1974-79, second 1986-89, and third 2006–2010. Since February this year, the data from the first ones are open. Big news, and asks for an experiment on how to make use of the data.

One of the main ideas behind the Atlases is to give a tool for comparison, to visualize possible shifts in the population. I decided to do a simple old-school web app, a snapshot from a given species: select, and see observations plotted on a map.

The hardest part in the data were the coordinates. How to transform the KKJ Uniform Coordinate System values to something that a layman like me finds more familiar, like ETRS89? After a few hours of head-banging, I had to turn to the data provider. Thanks to advice from Mikko Heikkinen, the wizard behind many a nature-related web application in this country – including the Atlas pages – the batch transformation was easy. Excellent service!.

All that was left was few joins between the datasets, and data was ready for an interactive R Shiny application. To reflect the reliability of observations on one particular area (scale from 1 to 4), I used four data classes from the PuBu ColorBrewer scheme to color the circles.

The application is here, and the code for those of you more inclined to R.

Note that the application is on a freemium Basic account of shinyapps.io so I cannot guarantee its availability. There is a monthly 25 500 hour use limit.