SparrowSpotter

Purpose

The purpose of SparrowSpotter is to visualize the locations of specific species of interest, utilizing the results from location extraction. Using a sample document, all locations related to the Baird’s Sparrow (a bird species designated as “Special Concern”) were identified. These locations were then plotted onto an interactive map using Leaflet.

Input

• The document containing locations related to the Baird’s Sparrow.

Output

• An interactive map of all locations extracted from the document, with the option to highlight locations specifically related to the Baird’s Sparrow.

Tools

• Leaflet: An open-source JavaScript library used to build web mapping applications.
• jQuery: An open-source JavaScript library used for web development.
• OpenStreetMap: A free map tile provider.
• BeautifulSoup4: An open-source HTML parsing library for Python, used to extract text content, font styles, locations, sizes, and other useful information from HTML documents.
• Regular Expressions (regex): A pattern matching tool for text that allows us to identify locations in consistent formats for specific location extraction.

Code

• convert-sparrow-locations-to-json.py: This script converts a .csv file of Baird’s Sparrow locations to a JavaScript file with JSON data, enabling it to be loaded into the visualization.

The bairds-sparrow-location-extraction/ folder contains:

• The HTML document used for this demonstration.
• The code used to extract locations, named extract-locations-bairds-sparrow.py. This script is similar to the location extraction for all documents, except the output is a .csv (instead of a text file) to easily fill in the locations related to the Baird’s Sparrow.

The docs/ folder contains:

• The JavaScript code (demo.js) used for the map.

Method

1. Extraction: All locations were extracted from the sample document using the location extraction methods. The locations were saved into a .csv file, which included information on which page each location was identified on and the order in which the locations appeared in the document.

2. Manual Check: Using the output .csv file, the locations were manually checked in the document to find those related to the Baird’s Sparrow. These locations were marked in a designated column in the .csv file.

3. Conversion: The final .csv file was converted to a JavaScript file containing a JSON object with information on the locations.

4. Visualization: A visualization was built using Leaflet, with tiles provided from OpenStreetMap. This visualization allows users to view all locations identified in the document and highlight locations specifically related to the Baird’s Sparrow.