About The Project
Hello! I'm Mike, a full-stack developer based in Sheffield.
This project was developed as part of my final year dissertation while studying Computer Science at Sheffield Hallam University, where I graduated with First Class Honours.
Using data from the British Birds journal, the aim was to bridge the gap between their reports and mainstream wildlife platforms such as the RSPB and BirdGuides. One of the main reasons for this is that conservation can be narrative, with success stories and declines often being reduced to singular assessments that lack historical context or criteria.
I also explored other areas of data visualisation, such as mapping and interactive taxonomy. All media was collected or created by myself - for better or worse!
Documenting UK Bird Species and Conservation Status
Tech Stack
- Backend Framework: Laravel (PHP)
- Database Engine: MySQL
- Frontend Architecture: Blade templates, Tailwind CSS, Leaflet.js for interactive mapping, and a D3.js cluster tree for the taxonomical graph.
- Deployed via Laravel Forge
Key Engineering Features
- Relational Architecture: A full relational database of taxonomy, species, conservation data and criteria. Controlled via an admin CRUD system.
- Content Pipeline An automated CLI media pipeline that manages thumbnail creation and image compression via jpegoptim and cwebp, as well as handling uploads and delivery of Amazon S3 hosted media.
During image processing, location telemetry is stripped to protect vulnerable nesting sites, while camera EXIF data is preserved for technical context. Ethical guidelines are followed but not automatically enforced, instead I will not upload media of protected UK species during critical nesting windows.