Citizen Data Science: Analyze Nature Without Programming

I recently gave an informal talk to a class of botany students at Gavilan College. The original topic was nature photography, but I also talked about the data science techniques that I used to create my recently completed photo book, Portraits of Birds: Shoreline Park. The concept for the book was to try to personally take photos of all of the bird species in a particular area, in this case Shoreline at Mountain View Park in Mountain View, California, which I later expanded to include the Palo Alto Baylands. To enumerate the species that have been seen in this area, I turned to two citizen science sites, iNaturalist and eBird, both of which have application programmatic interfaces (APIs). Note that while eBird is specific to birds, iNaturalist contains data on plants and other animals as well.