NocturnaPath

Passive wildlife monitoring and route planning for nocturnal field researchers. Built because every existing tool was either $4,000/year or last updated in 2009.

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What This Does

NocturnaPath ingests sensor feeds from motion-triggered camera traps, acoustic monitors, and GPS collar relays, then computes low-disturbance traversal routes for field teams operating after dark. Think "Google Maps but you're trying not to scare a barn owl."

Originally built for a single preserve in the Cascades. Now running at 14 partner sites across North America.

Features

• Route planning engine — cost-surface modeling based on species activity windows and terrain
• Sensor dashboard — real-time feed aggregation from camera traps, temperature nodes, and acoustic units
• Acoustic Triangulation (new in v0.9) — multi-mic array support for pinpointing call origin within ~8m radius. Uses time-difference-of-arrival across up to 6 nodes. See docs/acoustic_triangulation.md for calibration notes. честно говоря это заняло у меня три недели
• Species heat maps — exportable overlays for QGIS and ArcGIS
• Alert routing — Slack/PagerDuty/email for threshold breaches
• Offline mode — full functionality with cached tile layers when you're out of cell range (which is always)

Integrations

We're at 14 now (was 11 as of the v0.8 release, see #338 for the tracker). Current list:

Provider	Type	Status
Reconyx HyperFire 2	Camera trap	✅ stable
Bushnell Core	Camera trap	✅ stable
AudioMoth	Acoustic monitor	✅ stable
Song Meter Mini	Acoustic monitor	✅ stable
Cornell BirdNET	ML inference	✅ stable
Lotek Litetrack	GPS collar	✅ stable
Vectronic Aerospace	GPS collar	✅ stable
Cellular IoT (generic MQTT)	Telemetry	✅ stable
ESRI ArcGIS Online	Map layer export	✅ stable
QGIS plugin	Map layer export	✅ stable
iNaturalist	Observation sync	✅ stable
Wildlife Insights (Google)	Photo AI	✅ stable (flaky, not our fault)
Movebank	Tracking archive	✅ stable — added 2026-04-11
eBird	Species checklist	✅ stable — added 2026-05-03

Installation

git clone https://github.com/nocturna-path/nocturna-path.git
cd nocturna-path
pip install -r requirements.txt
cp config/config.example.yaml config/config.yaml
# edit config.yaml — at minimum set your sensor_mqtt_broker and tile_cache_dir
python -m nocturnapath serve

Requires Python 3.11+. Tested on Ubuntu 22.04 and macOS Sonoma. Windows support is theoretically possible, ask Rebeka if she ever finishes the port (#412).

Acoustic Triangulation Setup

New in v0.9. You'll need at least 3 AudioMoth or Song Meter units with GPS timestamps enabled. Position them in a rough polygon, max ~200m between nodes or TDOA accuracy degrades badly.

Config example:

acoustic:
  enabled: true
  nodes:
    - id: north_node
      lat: 47.6523
      lon: -122.3081
    - id: south_node
      lat: 47.6498
      lon: -122.3079
    - id: east_node
      lat: 47.6511
      lon: -122.3055
  tdoa_max_lag_ms: 600
  triangulation_method: hyperbolic  # or 'least_squares', but hyperbolic is better trust me

Full docs in docs/acoustic_triangulation.md. Known issue with reverb in canyon terrain — NP-441 is open for that.

Configuration

See config/config.example.yaml. Most things are documented inline. The ones that aren't are ones I haven't figured out how to document without writing an essay.

# minimal working config
database:
  url: postgresql://nocturna:changeme@localhost:5432/nocturnapath

sensors:
  poll_interval_seconds: 30

routes:
  cost_surface_resolution_m: 10
  disturbance_buffer_m: 50

Known Limitations

These are real limitations. Not "we'll fix it eventually" placeholders.

• USFWS e-permit API integration is blocked pending legal review. We started this in February (CR-2291). Legal needs to sign off on automated permit status checks before we can call the USFWS API in a production context — apparently there are data use terms that require a BAA-equivalent. Marco said he submitted the paperwork in March. It's June. No ETA. Until this is resolved, permit status has to be checked manually and entered into the permits table by hand. Sorry. I hate it too.

• Acoustic triangulation degrades significantly above ~1500m elevation due to temperature inversion effects on sound propagation. If you're working alpine terrain, treat the 8m accuracy claim as aspirational. 해발고도 높은 데서 테스트한 사람은 저뿐인 것 같음

• The ESRI integration requires ArcGIS Online credentials and will silently fail if your org's IP allowlist doesn't include your field server. This has caused at least three support tickets from the Yellowstone team. Added a warning log in v0.8.4 but I should make it louder — TODO before v1.0.

• Movebank's API rate limits are undocumented and inconsistently enforced. We retry with exponential backoff but if you're syncing a large archive you'll probably hit a wall around 2am and come back to a stalled job in the morning. Classic.

• No Windows installer. See #412.

Contributing

PRs welcome. Please open an issue first for anything non-trivial so we don't duplicate effort. Code style is whatever ruff says is fine.

License

MIT. Do whatever you want, just don't remove the attribution and don't sue me if a mountain lion finds your field team.