Changelog

Added

• A numbered observance and date range for each five-day period
• The nearby record behind each species phrase: how often it has been seen within 10 km and the month it appears in most
• No calendar at all when the local record is too thin to support one

Behind the scenes

• Each local calendar is assembled in the background and kept for a year
• The detected timing was checked against USA-NPN, an observer network independent of the records used to build it
• Flowering and fruiting dates come from observers' phenology notes, not simply the month a plant was photographed
• Bird names follow eBird's Clements checklist

Improved

• Sunrise, sunset, dusk, and the moon form one diagram instead of a list
• The moon is drawn at tonight's illumination rather than shown as a generic icon
• Bioscore and the Nature Activity Index share one place without competing for attention
• Growing zone, soil, geology, county flora, and climate sit together under Land and climate
• Coverage badges use distance, not category, to show how local a signal is
• Flora filters read as ordinary choices rather than a form

Added

• A county flora panel
• Separate views for Blooming, Fruiting, and All
• A choice to show native species only
• A separate list of state-designated noxious and invasive plants

Behind the scenes

• Species appear in order of how commonly they are documented
• County species lists are prepared ahead of time rather than decoded during a visit

Improved

• A severe hazard can now outrank sky and nature-activity stories
• The headline no longer repeats the Bioscore number shown above it
• Plant activity is grouped into leaf, flower, and fruit
• "Water quality" is now labelled "Waterway quality"

Added

• A Season Milestone for a species whose activity is unusual for the month
• A seasonality note in Biodiversity details when enough history is available
• Eleven cited natural-history accounts of nesting, migration, mating, and other seasonal behaviour
• A small, capped Biodiversity increase when several observed species are in season
• Common names beside scientific names wherever one is known

Improved

• A behaviour supported by a citation remains visible for its full window
• The headline no longer repeats the milestone's full explanation

Behind the scenes

• GBIF seasonality profiles are refreshed once a year for each species and state
• A cited account always outranks a statistical pattern, never the other way around
• Historical comparisons restarted cleanly after the Biodiversity calculation changed
• Spelling variants of a species name are treated as one species across providers

Added

• County drought conditions on the location page
• Nearby federally protected species among the wildlife details
• A quiet placeholder while the find of the day is being written

Improved

• Pages stay responsive while background updates run
• Mold and pollen no longer crowd out measured signals
• Background updates spread across the hour instead of arriving at once
• Headlines settle once instead of rewriting themselves mid-read

Fixed

• A pin dropped past the date line lands where you clicked
• Unusable orbital data no longer stalls a location's other updates
• Rate-limited sources wait longer instead of retrying together

Added

• Current county drought conditions from the U.S. Drought Monitor
• Federal endangered and threatened status for animals observed nearby
• Long-term state bird trends from the USGS Breeding Bird Survey
• One featured find a day: a living thing, rock or soil, with a photo
• Featured finds do not repeat a subject within a week

Improved

• Bird trends include uncertainty, survey years, and route coverage
• Annual bird data is prepared ahead of time rather than fetched during a visit
• Every place-specific sentence in a featured find is checked against its source
• Featured photographs are openly licensed, credited, and labelled when representative

Fixed

• Common plants such as Valley oak no longer appear as rare wildlife
• Wildlife observation counts are no longer mistaken for rarity
• Records with deliberately obscured locations are no longer treated as nearby

Improved

• Bioscore refreshes complete in under two seconds
• Saved-location controls stay in sync across the page
• Location photos refresh before their links expire and have better fallbacks
• Water uses the nearest real gauge instead of publishing a placeholder
• Location pages rank their facts once instead of repeating the work
• Sky cards reserve attention for genuinely notable passes and events
• Environmental cards describe conditions instead of narrating their scores

Fixed

• Repeated background jobs can no longer pile up for the same work
• Large wildlife responses no longer hold up score refreshes
• New readings arriving during a score refresh are no longer missed
• Scheduling work remains responsive while provider or scoring queues are busy
• Partially written daily summaries are detected and repaired
• Raw readings are never cleared before their daily summary is safely stored
• Database connections use the resolved address and the correct TLS settings
• Location cleanup cannot delete readings shared with a nearby location
• Backfills respect the same freshness checks as scheduled fetches

Behind the scenes

• A permanent daily history preserves measurements after raw-data cleanup
• Paid Google sources were disabled and pollen was kept inside the free tier
• Background work has explicit limits and duplicate protection
• Performance and mid-refresh data-loss cases are covered by the test suite

Added

• Sky card: aurora, moon, meteors, eclipses
• Planetary oppositions and conjunctions
• Local forest health outbreak signals
• Fire risk as its own scored category
• Streamflow and water temperature against their own history
• Today's high and low against the local normal
• How often it rains here on this date
• Ten-day runs, not just single afternoons
• How far the temperature moved in a day
• Air pressure, and which way it is going
• How many people felt an earthquake, and how strongly
• El Nino, and what it has meant at your own station
• A permanent daily record of every measurement
• Kept whole after the raw data is cleared away
• A page for sources we considered and declined

Improved

• Weather now says where it was measured
• Daily high, low, and reduced visibility
• Air quality carries a monitor map link
• Water station named and placed on a map
• Earthquakes ranked by real significance
• Forest health as a share of surveyed area
• Pollen marked when out of season
• Illness figures say how delayed they are
• An empty wildfire card still offers the map
• The two score panels read as a pair
• Scores say where they sit in words, not percentages
• Card bodies keep their line breaks

Fixed

• Wind direction, which had been silently missing
• Fire danger replaced with NOAA's own outlook
• Card drilldowns and source links
• Sweeps recover from a schedule they slept through
• Sweeps no longer skip locations out of phase
• A missing queue that stalled hourly updates
• Stranded background jobs are rescued
• Fires already out are no longer reported
• Local temperature normals that matched nothing at all
• An all-clear no longer reads as missing data
• The signal count counts only signals that exist here
• The same fact no longer appears twice on one page
• A missing icon no longer blanks the page
• Category names that read as English, not labels
• "For this time of year" now means it
• Seasonal comparisons re-centre as the year moves

Behind the scenes

• Recorded live provider responses for all 23 sources
• A test that catches data we collect but never read
• A generated reference for every provider payload
• An automatic check for leaked API keys

Added

• Forward-looking fire weather risk
• Humidity and UV index on the weather card
• Sunrise, sunset, and twilight in local time
• Insect and spider activity on biodiversity
• Streamflow and water temperature on the water card
• Which categories pull the score up or down
• Links out from every detail row

Changed

• Nature activity scored by effort, not raw counts
• A serious hazard now caps the score outright
• Three sun-timed colour schemes replace the cream theme
• A taller map on the landing page

Fixed

• Stale provider data lingering in card details
• Dependency security updates

Added

• Error tracking and a background job dashboard
• One source of truth for coverage granularity

Changed

• Headline polish happens in the background and is cached
• Refresh cadence eased back to every thirty minutes
• Google data held for eight hours instead of refetched

Fixed

• Three retention bugs behind a huge delete spike
• Duplicate "no fresh data" tiles
• Two near-identical trend messages shown at once
• A missing "still building history" message

Added

• A What to Notice Right Now card
• Seasonal milestones: first bloom, migration, stream warming
• Three more cross-signal connections
• Water temperature and streamflow readings
• Daily cleanup of old readings and snapshots

Changed

• Milestone cards stay visible for two days
• Score changes never blamed on wildlife counts

Added

• A Since Your Last Visit comparison
• More varied headlines, naming what was actually seen
• Anonymous, cookieless visitor counts
• understory.today as the real address

Changed

• A different location photo on each visit
• Return comparisons only after a real gap

Fixed

• Repeated database queries causing slow page loads
• Live pages dropped when the server scaled down
• The home map no longer asks for your location

The first version

• Pick any point and get a daily reading of it
• The Bioscore, and how favourable today is
• The Nature Activity Index for how alive it is
• Cards for birds, biodiversity, and plant timing
• Cards for weather, air quality, pollen, and mold
• Cards for water, wildfires, alerts, and illness season
• A written summary of what stood out
• Every card opens for the detail behind it
• A two-week score trend, and saved locations
• Badges saying how local each signal really is
• Comparisons against this location's own history

Same day

• The warm, organic look the site still wears
• Precise weather and air quality from Google
• Location photos, with three fallbacks
• Six connections drawn between separate signals
• A crash loop, a database setting, and a stale asset cache