Shiny Applications…
Power-4 Girth Index — Roster & Recruiting Intelligence
This app compares how all 67 programs across the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, and SEC build football and basketball recruiting classes from 2016–2027. Start with where the data stands: source and pipeline freshness, program coverage, completed seasons, open classes, and sport-specific snapshots. From there, explore height × weight Body Maps, Position DNA, recruiting and coaching-era trends, and role projections. Program Reach maps how far each school recruits, while Talent Origins maps the last listed high-school or prep location of captured signees by state, position group, and year. The direct Matchup view compares any two programs — for example, Arizona vs. Alabama — while keeping rankings and averages in each program’s own-conference context. For football, Talent vs Results, Wins Above Talent, and the season scoreboard test whether recruiting strength becomes wins. Data comes from 247Sports and CollegeFootballData, with sample sizes, open-cycle flags, and limitations stated in context. A Power-4 relaunch of my earlier Big-12 Talent Pathways app.
⭆ Open the live Power-4 Girth Index
NEON Small Mammal Tracker
This shiny application turns National Ecological Observatory Network (https://data.neonscience.org/) box-trapping records into the life history of every small mammal NEON has caught across 46 field sites. It opens on a tap-a-site national map — pick a site to see who lives there, or flip to “by species” to map where one animal turns up across the country. Open any site for a Hall of Fame of the most-caught individuals (re-sortable, with rarity tiers), trap-grid home-range heatmaps, a Hill-number diversity profile, and detection-corrected abundance — closed-capture estimates (Schnabel / Chapman) that count the animals the traps missed, shown alongside MNKA. Plus shareable trading-card profiles, a two-site compare, and a printable report card. Methods are stated honestly: reused tags are flagged, Chao1 is a bias-corrected lower bound, and the size index is an adult weight percentile. Each site loads instantly from a pre-bundled, compressed dataset. A complete redesign of my original tracker.
Explore the NEON suite
Click the Driver Cascade to explore its sibling NEON flora, fauna, and aquatic apps. It fans the nine explorers out around the hub; click again to open the capstone itself, or tap any sibling to dive in.
Plants in Movies
Explore Arrakis, Middle-earth and Isla Nublar through real USDA plant records. Choose states, compare their counts, and open a plant family to see its part in each match.
The new botanical atlas pairs antique-style illustrations with cinematic motion and a movable specimen lens. Save up to 12 family comparisons in your field notebook, then download the counts. Notes last for the current visit, so download them before closing the app.
The percentage view shows each state’s share of the national total for those families. It does not adjust for state size or large plant families. The movie associations are hand-picked, and the generated illustrations are not a guide for identifying plants.
Older Applications
USFS Name Converter ⭆ Click for Stand Alone App