WildTrack Live

WildTrack Live is an interactive Streamlit application for exploring recent lesser kestrel tracking records from Movebank. It turns a large GPS dataset into an accessible map showing individual birds, recent routes and the latest recorded positions.

The data is recent, but it is not a real-time safety tracker. Locations only change when the source study publishes a new GPS record.

Features

• Loads animal and GPS tracking data from Movebank
• Displays the latest position of every tracked bird
• Lets users select an individual lesser kestrel
• Draws the selected bird's 500 most recent GPS records as a route
• Marks the start and latest point of the displayed route
• Shows tracker details and timestamps in map popups
• Caches requests to reduce unnecessary calls to Movebank
• Handles connection and rate-limit errors with clear messages

Technology

• Python
• Streamlit
• pandas
• Folium and streamlit-folium
• Movebank direct-read service

How it works

The app requests individual and movement records from Movebank, converts the timestamps and coordinates with pandas, then keeps the latest location for each tracked bird. Selecting one bird draws its 500 most recent records as a route on a Folium map.

Run locally

1. Create and activate a virtual environment:

   python3 -m venv .venv
   source .venv/bin/activate

2. Install the dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Copy .streamlit/secrets.toml.example to .streamlit/secrets.toml and add your own Movebank login details.

4. Start the application:

   streamlit run main.py

Data and privacy

The application accesses Movebank study 2961927604. Tracking records are recent observations, not guaranteed live locations. Friendly bird names are display aliases created for this project and are not the animals' official names.

Movebank credentials are stored locally in .streamlit/secrets.toml. This file is excluded from Git and must never be uploaded.

View Movebank study 2961927604

Movebank may temporarily limit repeated requests. The app caches responses for one hour and shows a clear message if the service returns a rate-limit error.

Project purpose

This portfolio project demonstrates API integration, data processing, error handling, caching and interactive geospatial visualisation using real conservation data.