KoreAves: Evidence-first atlas for birds recorded in South Korea

Explore South Korean bird species through regional occurrence evidence, source provenance, GIS views and comparison tools. Built around the 2025 KBR/NIBR national list, with explicit safeguards against treating records as abundance or missing records as confirmed absence.

I built KoreAves after repeatedly running into the same problem: useful Korean bird data already exists, but taxonomy, regional records, images and source provenance are spread across different systems. The goal is not to replace KBR/NIBR, eBird, Macaulay, Avibase or other sources. It is to make the path from species → Korean region → evidence → original source much shorter. A major design constraint is avoiding conclusions the records cannot support. The interface explicitly distinguishes records from abundance, missing records from confirmed absence, and same-region records from co-occurrence. I would especially value feedback on taxonomy/naming, regional record presentation, image provenance and any UI that accidentally implies more than the evidence supports.

One thing KoreAves made obvious after launch: the hardest part of a bird atlas wasn't rendering regions. It was deciding what a clean interface is allowed to imply.
A record is not abundance. Missing records are not absence. A matched name is not automatically the same taxon concept. And a modern bird photo can be easier to find than one whose rights and provenance are actually auditable.
That last problem became a guest piece on 10,000 Birds:
https://www.10000birds.com/the-b...
I'm now treating source-to-concept reconciliation and provenance as first-class product data rather than metadata added at the end. For evidence-heavy products, that distinction has turned out to matter more than I expected.

KoreAves

Evidence-first atlas for birds recorded in South Korea

Evidence-first atlas for birds recorded in South Korea

Forum Threads

The hard part after launch wasn't the map — it was provenance

Forum Threads

The hard part after launch wasn't the map — it was provenance