Penguin Colony Tracker

A web app I'm building for a friend's penguin monitoring group. It's deployed and still in active development. It tracks nest boxes, breeding pairs, eggs, chicks and their fates, identifies birds by microchip, and builds family trees across generations with a lineage explorer and colony-wide statistics. A keyboard-driven entry screen makes logging a round of nest checks fast, and the app can produce a summary ready to re-enter into the national database. The most interesting part was the data model. Parentage is recorded through breeding attempts rather than fixed mother and father fields, so it copes with birds re-pairing, losing a mate, re-laying, or having an unknown sex or unknown parents. Season statistics follow hatching and fledging success, divorce rates and adult survival across years and between sites, and a review step flags entries that don't add up before a round of checks is committed. During development the app runs against a simulated colony, generated from a seeded model of penguin breeding behaviour, so every screen can be tested against years of realistic data.