Bird Watch Visualization App

Access the Live Shiny App

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About This Project

This is our Assignment 3 for Information Visualisation (GEOM90007) at the University of Melbourne. We built an interactive app that shows bird sightings around Melbourne using R Shiny and Tableau.

The app lets users explore where different bird species have been spotted in Melbourne, when they were seen, and how bird diversity varies across the city. We used real data from BirdLife Australia to make this visualization.

Our Team

• Sarathi T S - tssarathi5901@gmail.com
• Eby Thomas - thomas.e2@student.unimelb.edu.au
• Harish Kannan - harish.kannan@student.unimelb.edu.au
• Mahek Jain - mahek.jain@student.unimelb.edu.au

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Data We Used

We got our bird sighting data from BirdLife Australia's Birdata database through the Atlas of Living Australia. The dataset has over 32,000 bird observation records within the City of Melbourne (LGA: Melbourne).

We gratefully acknowledge BirdLife Australia and the Atlas of Living Australia for making these data openly available for educational purposes.

Data Citation

Atlas of Living Australia occurrence download at ALA occurrence search accessed on 20 October 2025.
Descriptive and image content retrieved via the Wikipedia REST API accessed on 20 October 2025.
Audio content accessed via the Xeno-Canto API on 20 October 2025 for academic, non-commercial use.
Morphological trait data derived from the AVONET global bird dataset and merged with species occurrence records using the scientific name field accessed on 22 October 2025.
Spatial boundary and locality shapefiles obtained from the City of Melbourne Open Data Portal and Geoscape Administrative Boundaries accessed on 25 October 2025.

DOIs:

• Atlas of Living Australia: Dataset DOI

Data sources:

• BirdLife Australia (2019). Birdata (Birdata).
  Accessed via the ALA on 01/03/2019.
  For more information: ALA dataset dr359.

• Records provided by BirdLife Australia, accessed through ALA website.
  For more information: ALA dataset dp28.

• Wikipedia contributors (2025). Species descriptions and representative images retrieved via the Wikipedia REST API.
  API endpoint: Wikipedia REST API.
  Documentation: MediaWiki REST API docs.

• City of Melbourne (Open Data Portal). Municipal Boundary Dataset (City of Melbourne shapefile).
  Downloaded from Municipal boundary export.

• Geoscape Australia / Commonwealth of Australia (2025).
  VIC Suburb/Locality Boundaries – Geoscape Administrative Boundaries (GDA2020).
  Downloaded from Geoscape administrative boundaries.
  Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

• Tobias, J.A., et al. (2022). AVONET: Morphological, ecological and geographical data for all birds.
  Downloaded from AVONET dataset.
  Merged with pre-processed occurrence data using the scientific name field.

• Xeno-Canto Foundation. Xeno-Canto — Bird sounds from around the world [Dataset].
  Includes bird call recordings displayed with per-track attribution.
  Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) DOI: GBIF DOI.
  Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 and CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
  Terms of Use: Xeno-Canto terms.

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Third-Party Libraries

This project uses the tableau-in-shiny R library (version 1.2, 2024-09-04) written by Alan Thomas from the University of Melbourne. This library is provided as part of the GEOM90007 Information Visualisation course materials and enables seamless embedding of Tableau Public visualizations in Shiny applications using the Tableau Embedding API v3.

• File: R/tableau-in-shiny-v1.2.R
• Author: Alan Thomas, University of Melbourne
• Copyright: 2023–2024 The University of Melbourne
• License: MIT License

We gratefully acknowledge the provision of this library code for educational purposes in the GEOM90007 course.

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Getting Started

Note: This app uses CSS styles that are not supported by the built-in RStudio viewer. For the best experience, open the app in an external browser.

Install R dependencies

source("./R/libraries.R")

Run the Shiny app (interactive)

From the project root directory:

shiny::runApp()

Run the Shiny app without launching a browser

shiny::runApp(launch.browser = FALSE)

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Optional Build Steps (Webpack Assets)

Some front-end assets are compiled with webpack from ./src to ./www. Only run these steps if you need to modify the non-R source files.

Install Node.js dependencies

npm install

Build assets

npm run build

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Project Structure

root
├── Data: data sources for the dashboard
├── R: supporting R scripts for the app
├── src: supporting non-R source files and assets
└── www: production non-R files and assets for use by the app

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Limitations & Future Work

• Audio data is missing for eight bird species, so playback is unavailable for those entries.
• The AVONET morphological dataset is prepared but not yet integrated; future versions will incorporate it to extend the visual and analytical features.

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