The app opens to a national map of every NEON site. Tap a dot to dive in (dot size = animals caught there, color = the dominant mammal family), or flip to "by species" to map where a single animal turns up across the country. Each site loads instantly from a per-site data bundle that ships with the app (no network round-trip). From there it reconstructs each animal's capture history from its ear-tag ID, ranks the regulars, profiles individuals, estimates abundance, and maps where they were caught. A sidebar with the classic state → site → date picker is still there for power users.
It is built for two audiences: anyone curious about NEON small-mammal sampling, and new field technicians getting to know the species at their site.
Select-your-site map · A national Leaflet map of all 46 bundled sites, sized by total captures and colored by the most-caught mammal family, with a "by site / by species" toggle, an accessible list fallback, and a one-tap load. A 30-second guided tour points out the rest.
Explore by species · Pick any of 145 species and the map redraws to just the sites where it's caught, sized by local abundance: a live national range map.
Detection-corrected abundance · Closed-capture estimates per trapping bout (Schnabel for ≥3 nights, Chapman for 2) with a per-night detection probability, shown alongside MNKA, gated when recaptures are too few, and clamped to the minimum known alive. Defensible, with caveats shown.
Diversity profile · Hill numbers (q0 richness, q1 effective-common, q2 effective-dominant) plus an evenness read, computed over distinct individuals.
Shareable trading cards, compare, and report cards · Export any individual's dossier as a holographic PNG trading card, put two sites head-to-head, or print a one-page site report card to PDF.
Overview: the story of a site · Species ranked by abundance, an automatically written plain-English summary, and quick-jump navigation to every view.
Hall of Fame: rank every individual · A top-3 podium over a leaderboard of every animal, re-sortable by captures, weight, career length, roaming, or weight-for-its-species, with rarity tiers and a Legendary shimmer. Each dossier opens with a computed one-line "story" (the animal's standout stat ranked against its peers, like "the most-caught individual at this site") and count-up stats.
How it stays honest
Every site loads from a saved copy of the data, and every view shows
the method behind the number. How many animals are out there starts as the count
actually caught and ear-tagged (the minimum we know were alive). When animals are recaptured
often enough, the app also estimates how many were probably missed by the traps, and it never
claims fewer than were caught. How varied the community is counts each individual once,
so an animal caught many times is not counted many times. Body size is shown to spot
unusual or mistyped records, not to judge an animal's fitness. Because each animal keeps one
tag for life, an animal seen across several years is treated as the real long-lived animal it
is. The app flags only records that cannot be true, like one tag showing up in two places on
the same day. This is an educational tool for exploring data. It is not affiliated with
NEON, Battelle, or the NSF.