About
Species Sphere
An ambient monitor for the planet’s biodiversity records.
What you’re looking at
Every fifteen seconds, the globe turns to a point on the Earth’s surface where somebody photographed a living thing and wrote down what they saw. The sidebar shows that observation: the species, where it was found, when, and who took the picture.
These are called occurrence records, and there are billions of them, published by museums, herbaria, research stations, and amateur naturalists through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Species Sphere reads them live and does nothing but show them to you, one at a time. There is nothing to click and nothing to configure.
Anatomy of a record
Each field in the sidebar maps to a field in the published record. This is one of the five observations bundled with the app, laid out beside the names GBIF gives them.
- scientificName
- Trifolium repens L.
- vernacularName
- White Clover
- wikidata label (ja)
- シロツメクサLooked up separately — not part of the GBIF record.
- kingdom … family
- Plantae · Tracheophyta · Magnoliopsida · Fabaceae
- country
- United States of America
- decimalLatitude
decimalLongitude - 33.7121° N, 118.2841° WWhere the globe travels to, and where the marker pulses.
- eventDate
- 2026-01-01
- iucnRedListCategory
- —Clover carries no assessment. About 45% of records do; when one is present it is shown beside the taxonomy.
- records for speciesKey
- 1,832,626Counted across the whole of GBIF, not just this monitor. Asked once per deck, for all eighty species at a time.
- media[].identifier
- The photographServed by the publisher’s own image host, not copied here.
- license · rightsHolder
- CC BY-NC © Malik Vest-Walton
Values are shown as published. Nothing is inferred, corrected, or generated. Where a record carries no common name, the app falls back to the genus rather than inventing one. A record count measures how often people have photographed and reported a species, which is not the same as how many of them there are: pigeons are common in the data partly because they are common in cities.
What it does
- A new record every 15 seconds, drawn from a rolling pool of up to 400.
- Records arrive in decks of 80, each one pinned to a different country and month so the globe actually travels.
- Records come from iNaturalist Research-grade Observations, published to GBIF.
- Every place the monitor has been stays on the globe as an amber point — fading with age, and sized by how seldom that species has been recorded. An hour of watching leaves a map of where the unusual things turned up. The last 300 are kept.
- Each record shows how many times its species has ever been recorded in GBIF. The span is six orders of magnitude: some species are known from a dozen sightings, a feral pigeon from fifteen million.
- Where GBIF carries an IUCN Red List assessment it is shown. Roughly 45% of records have one, and about 3% are near threatened or worse — one every eight minutes or so.
- The globe is drawn on a plain 2D canvas — no WebGL and no 3D library. Meridians every 30°, 150 drifting particles, coastlines from Natural Earth 110m.
- Japanese names come from Wikidata, resolved for a whole deck at once before it is handed to any browser.
- The ambient soundtrack is synthesised live with Web Audio oscillators — no samples, no audio files. It stays off until you turn it on.
- Five records ship with the app, so the monitor still has something to show when GBIF is unreachable.
Runs in your browser
There are no accounts, no advertising, and no cross-site trackers. Page views are counted by Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookies. The record pool and the trail both live in your browser’s local storage and never leave your machine.
Your browser never talks to GBIF or Wikidata. Decks are assembled and cached at the edge, so those two are asked for a deck once and then serve everyone who wants it, however many people are watching. All your browser loads is this site, the image host named in each record, and the coastline file. A content security policy is enforced to keep it that way.