US Wildlife Explorer

Privacy Policy

Last updated: 24 July 2026

The short version

US Wildlife Explorer is a free wildlife map run by one person. There are no accounts, no sign-up, no passwords, and no advertising. We don't sell or share your personal information, and we don't build profiles about you.

Your life list and preferences are stored on your own device, not on our servers.

What this policy covers

This policy applies to the website at wildlifeexplorer.us and to the US Wildlife Explorer Android app, which displays that same website.

Information stored on your device

The app saves the following in your browser's local storage. It stays on your device and is never sent to us:

• Your life list — the species you mark as seen.
• Sightings you report for a park.
• Preferences — light/dark theme, season and time-of-day settings, and whether park photos are shown.
• Cached wildlife data, so the app keeps working offline in parks with no signal.

You can erase all of it at any time by clearing your browser's site data (or clearing the app's storage on Android). Doing so also erases your life list, so you may want to export it first using the export button on the life-list screen.

Location

Location is used for one optional feature: the “Near me” button, which lists the parks closest to you.

• Your browser or phone will ask your permission first. If you decline, everything else in the app still works.
• Your coordinates are used in your browser to sort parks by distance. We never store your location, and it is never written to our servers or database.
• For the “rare birds nearby” list, your coordinate is rounded to roughly one kilometre before it is used to query the eBird API — enough to describe an area, not enough to identify where you are.

If you contact us

If you use the Feedback form, we receive what you type: the category, the park it relates to, your message, and — only if you choose to provide it — an email address so we can reply. It is relayed to our email inbox through Web3Forms and used solely to answer you or fix the problem you reported. We don't add you to any mailing list.

Error reports

If something in the app crashes, a technical error report is written to our server logs: the error message, a stack trace, the page address, and your browser type. This is used only to find and fix bugs, and is not linked to your identity.

Analytics

We use Vercel Web Analytics to count page views so we know which parks and features people use. It is cookieless and aggregated — it does not track you across other websites and does not build an individual profile of you.

Cookies

We don't use tracking or advertising cookies. The only data stored in your browser is the on-device information described above.

Other services we rely on

Wildlife information comes from public scientific databases, and the app is hosted and served by third parties. As with any website, these services receive your IP address as a normal part of delivering content:

• eBird (Cornell Lab of Ornithology), iNaturalist, GBIF, and the National Park Service — species records.
• Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons — species and park photos.
• OpenStreetMap and CARTO — map tiles.
• Vercel — hosting and analytics.
• Web3Forms — delivering feedback messages.
• Buy Me a Coffee — if you choose to donate. Payments are handled entirely on their site under their own privacy policy; we never see your card details.

Children

US Wildlife Explorer is a general-audience nature app. It is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them.

Your choices and your data

• Location: decline the permission prompt, or turn it off in your browser or phone settings.
• Your life list and preferences: export or clear them at any time from the app; clearing site data removes them completely.
• Messages you sent us: email us and we'll delete them from our inbox.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the date at the top of the page will change with it. Significant changes will be noted in the app's “What's new” section.

Contact

Questions about privacy, or a request about your data? Email contact@wildlifeexplorer.us.