About Alitaptap

Why fireflies, and why a map

Fireflies are disappearing quietly. They are hurt by the three things that spread fastest around a growing city — light at night, tidied-up land, and insecticide — and because they are small, seasonal and active only after dark, their decline is very hard to notice. A place can lose them completely and nobody writes it down.

A map is the cheapest way to write it down. One person who sees a firefly in a field behind their house has an anecdote; a thousand such observations, each with a date and a location, become a record that can be compared year to year and argued from. That is the entire idea here.

The name is Filipino. Alitaptap is the word for firefly in Tagalog, and the Philippines is where this project started — a country whose mangrove fireflies are among the most spectacular in the world and among the least documented.

Where the records come from

Every sighting on the map comes from one of two places, and the map says which:

• Community reports — someone saw a firefly and logged it here. These are held for human review before they appear publicly, so the map is not a place to post whatever you like.
• Research-grade observations from iNaturalist, a long-established biodiversity platform. These have been identified and confirmed by other naturalists, and each one links back to the original record so you can check it yourself.

What we deliberately do not map

iNaturalist randomises the coordinates of observations whose location is obscured or private — roughly one research-grade firefly record in eleven, with a reported accuracy of about 28 kilometres — while still returning a coordinate that looks perfectly ordinary. Mapping those would put pins in the wrong valley and give no sign of it.

So we ask the API only for open locations and then re-check every record individually before it is mapped, because a query parameter can be quietly renamed and that kind of failure is invisible. Records that fail the check are not shown. We would rather have a smaller map than a confidently wrong one.

Identification, without pretending

The guided flash ID walks through four questions — flash pattern, colour, habitat, region — and narrows down which species you are likely to have seen. It is ordinary logic, not a model: the same answers always give the same result, and you can read why each species was suggested.

It can also tell you that it does not know. "Unsure" is an option on every question and is not counted against anything, and a set of answers the guide cannot place returns nothing rather than a confident guess. An unidentified sighting with an honest date and location is worth more to this project than a wrong species name.

The data is yours too

The sightings collected here are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence and can be downloaded in full, as GeoJSON or CSV, from /api/sightings. No account, no request, no scraping the map.

This is the part that makes the project worth doing rather than just nice to look at. A dataset that cannot be obtained cannot be used by a researcher, a local conservation group, or a student, and a licence nobody can act on is decoration.

Who runs it

Alitaptap is an independent, volunteer-run project, not a company or an institution. It is funded by whatever the donation links bring in, plus a small amount of advertising, and it costs very little to run because it is deliberately built to be cheap: static pages, one small database, and public APIs.

If something here is wrong — a misidentified species, a pin in the wrong place, a claim that does not hold up — please tell us. The contact page is the fastest route.