About the data, sources and credits
How the forecast, seasons and hours are worked out, and who made the photos and text
Weather is the real National Weather Service forecast, captured at build time from six
points spanning Indiana — Valparaiso, Columbia City, Terre Haute, Muncie, Evansville and Madison.
Whichever is nearest your scope is used. The page also attempts a live refresh from
api.weather.gov, which the artifact sandbox blocks; host the file yourself and it works.
Season and hours are computed from research-grade iNaturalist records across all 92
counties, counted as outings — one observer, one day, one place, however many photographs it
produced — and corrected for observer effort against 1.69 million all-taxa records from the same
counties. Everything recalculates for whatever scope you choose.
Weather thresholds come from published survey protocols — Wisconsin DNR frog and toad
survey water-temperature guilds, Big Night migration criteria, and Plethodon surface-activity
research.
Habitat notes are marked as species-level where they were checked individually and
genus-level otherwise; they are never invented for a species. Coordinates are rounded, and
records that iNaturalist obscures for sensitive species are excluded from the map.
Observe, don't handle.