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Lough on Data
Lough on Data

Rufous
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Rufous is the public field companion built on top of the Databox reference warehouse. Pick an Arizona bird and place; Rufous checks licensed observations in the current public snapshot, builds an explainable outing around your selected time, and creates a calendar file on your device.

Try Rufous

Licensed static evidence, browser-local watches, and deterministic planning.

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Rufous has no application server: search, planning, saved watches, and calendar downloads run in your browser from an immutable R2 release with a matching Pages fallback.

What it demonstrates
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  • A warehouse with a real consumer. Rufous turns modeled observations, species context, licensed provenance, and place data into an application rather than another static dashboard.
  • Explainable recommendations. Candidate locations and guidance are calculated deterministically from the selected origin, radius, time, and licensed occurrence evidence, so the result does not depend on a remote model.
  • A deliberately small public footprint. Search, watch evaluation, and calendar generation run in the browser. Watches stay on the device, and no email address is collected.
  • A static-compute launch. Cloudflare Pages serves the application and its complete fallback snapshot; Cloudflare R2 serves the primary immutable JSON release. There is no application server, weather call, AI call, or email server.

Public-data boundary
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The initial release uses the EOD – eBird Observation Dataset distributed by GBIF under its published CC BY 4.0 license. Direct eBird API data, downloads, hotspots, observer names, private locations, email state, and raw occurrence or checklist identifiers are excluded. Cornell’s written permission would still be required before Rufous adds a separate direct-eBird data path.

The application is built from the open-source Databox repository. Its current data sources and required credits are available in the application’s attribution view.