Data & sources
What’s real here, and what isn’t.
Guardian Ledger asks people to prove their environmental work. It would be absurd for the app to invent its own numbers while doing that. So here is the full accounting.
Real, live and sourced
iNaturalist API
Wildlife sightings reported by real people
The sighting counts on the home page, the live cards below, and the live layer on the impact map are fetched at page load from the public iNaturalist API. Every observation is research-grade — meaning the community has agreed on the species — and each one keeps its observer, date, coordinates, photo licence and a link back to the original record. We display it; we do not author it.
- • Photographs are used under the Creative Commons licence shown on each card.
- • If the API is unreachable, the app shows nothing rather than a stale or invented number.
- • Observation counts are whatever iNaturalist reports at the moment you load the page.
Sample data, created for this demo
Everything below was written by us to show how the product works. None of it describes a real event, and none of it should be quoted as a fact about the world.
- The 14 ledger records
- The beach cleanup at Muizenberg, the Alexandra tree planting, the Kruger hornbill sighting and the rest. Realistic, but invented. The photographs are drawn illustrations, not photos.
- The teams and the leaderboard
- “SAHETI Eco Guardians”, “Nairobi River Guardians”, “Mombasa Mangrove Collective” and the others are fictional. SAHETI is a real school; the eco team, its points and its ranking are not.
- The Impact Passport
- Its badges, level and totals are computed from the sample records — real arithmetic over invented inputs.
- Dashboard charts
- Counted from the sample ledger, not from a platform. An earlier draft of this app showed an invented six-month activity chart and a fake “1,284 verified actions”. Both have been removed.
- Certificates
- Every sample certificate is stamped “sample certificate” on the sheet itself, so a printed PDF can’t be passed off as real.
Your own records
Anything you record lives in your browser’s localStorage and nowhere else — there is no server and no account. It is real in the sense that you entered it, and it is labelled “recorded by you” wherever it appears. You haven’t recorded any yet.
What “verified” does not mean
The four checks — evidence submitted, location confirmed, details reviewed, verified impact — are a simulated demo process. They confirm a record is complete, located and internally consistent. Nobody looks at your photographs, and no AI inspects them. Independent review is the next milestone; it is not something this build does, and the app never says otherwise.
Why cleanups aren’t live too
The obvious question: if sightings can be live, why not cleanups? Because when this was built, no free, key-less, browser-accessible API of real cleanup events could be found. OpenLitterMap publishes open litter data but exposes no public JSON endpoint we could call; Marine Debris Tracker’s API did not respond; Ocean Conservancy publishes downloads, not an API. Rather than fake it, the cleanup records stay clearly marked as sample data — and the moment a real source is available, it drops into lib/live.ts beside iNaturalist.
Live right now
Not a screenshot. These loaded from iNaturalist when you opened this page.