How Wildlife of Everywhere works
Wildlife of Everywhere answers two questions: what lives here? and where can I see it? It does that with free field guides to individual destinations, and one world database underneath them that links species to the parks and reserves where they have been recorded.
Mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians only. Fish, insects and plants are not covered.
What you can use
Three ways in, one database
Destination guides
One country or island covered in depth: a photo guide to the species, the best parks and reserves, written species accounts, a trip planner and a sightings log.
The world map
Every park and reserve we have data for, worldwide. Pick a place to see what has been recorded there, or pick a species to see where it has been recorded.
Field guide builder
Choose a park, a region or a whole trip and get a printable field guide and checklist of the species you could see, in taxonomic order.
The process
From a sighting to a page
- Someone sees an animal and records it.
A birder logs it on eBird, a naturalist uploads a photo to iNaturalist, a museum digitises a specimen, a national survey publishes its data. All of these end up in GBIF, the global database of species records.
- We download the open records, country by country.
274 GBIF downloads so far, each with its own citation. We only take records that are free to reuse (CC0 or CC BY).
- We throw out records we can't trust.
Zoo animals, fossils, records with flagged or vague locations (more than 2 km uncertain) are dropped before anything is counted.
- We check which park each record falls inside.
Using park boundaries from OpenStreetMap, Wikidata and official park lists. A species counts as recorded at a park once it has 3 or more records there, or records from 2 or more separate sources.
- We add what our own guides know.
Our guide writers and published trip reports list species that GBIF doesn't have at a place yet. These are shown with their own label, never mixed in silently.
- It becomes pages you can read.
Species pages, park pages, the map, the field guide builder and the destination guides all read from the same database, so they agree with each other.
Reading the labels
How sure are we?
Every species listed at a place carries one of these labels, so you can see where the claim comes from.
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Recorded on GBIF | 3 or more records, or records from 2 or more separate sources, inside the park. The strongest evidence we show. |
| 1–2 GBIF records | Only one or two records. Could be a real resident, a wanderer or a mistake. Treat with caution. |
| GBIF + our guide | Recorded on GBIF and also listed by our guide for this place. |
| Reported by our guide | Listed by our guide or a trip report, but not on GBIF at this place (yet). Based on experience, not on a published record. |
Protecting wildlife
What we deliberately don't show
Publishing exactly where a rare animal lives can help poachers and collectors. So:
- Reptiles and amphibians are only shown on a 20 km grid, never by park.
- Critically Endangered species and heavily trafficked animals (such as pangolins and the Helmeted Hornbill) get no "where to see" page and are left out of park lists.
- Many threatened species are already hidden or blurred in GBIF by the people who recorded them. We keep it that way.
Who's behind it
Who makes this
Wildlife of Everywhere started as a single field guide, Wildlife of Borneo, and grew one destination at a time. It is an independent project, free to use, with no sign-up. Wildlife watchers help it grow by sending in photos, trip reports and corrections.
It is a guide for travellers and wildlife watchers, not a scientific dataset. If you need data for research, use GBIF directly: every country download we use is listed with its citation on our data sources page.
Where our data comes fromSend a photo or correctionWhat's next
What we're working on
Now
Written accounts for species that only have a name and photo. Replacing drawings and museum photos with photos of live animals.
Next
Best months to see each species. More trip reports linked to the parks they visited.
Later
Range maps. New destination guides.
Last updated 2026-11-05. Numbers on this page are counted from the live database each time it is rebuilt.