KoreAves: Explore South Korean Bird Records with Sources and Regional Evidence
Looking up a South Korean bird is one thing. Finding out which public sources support a regional record, and what those records can actually tell you, is another. Taxonomy references, occurrence datasets and mapping tools answer different questions.
I built KoreAves, a free, non-commercial evidence reference for South Korean birds, to connect those questions without pretending that a record map is a complete biological distribution map.
한국어: 한국 조류 지도와 기록 출처를 함께 확인하는 법
617 taxa, not 617 species
The canonical starting point is South Korea’s 2025 national bird reference: 597 species plus 20 subspecies, or 617 taxa in all. A subspecies is not counted as an additional species. KoreAves keeps that distinction explicit and does not silently equate a name match with evidence of a taxonomic synonym.
The atlas offers taxon pages, comparisons, regional views, source documentation and provenance links. It primarily uses English with Korean names and navigation available alongside them.
Explore documented evidence across 17 regions
The interactive GIS explorer lets you select a bird taxon and examine where qualifying source evidence is documented within South Korea’s 17 first-level administrative divisions.
The map carries explicit limitations:
- A shaded region is not a biological range polygon. It indicates eligible documented evidence within that administrative unit.
- No eligible record is not evidence of biological absence. The analyzed and filtered public sources may simply contain no qualifying observation.
- Record counts are not bird counts or population estimates. They can be affected by observation effort, reporting and source coverage.
- Regional overlap is not co-occurrence. Two taxa documented within one large division may have been recorded at unrelated places and times.
These distinctions matter when maps are read by visitors, educators, birders and researchers. The interface tries to keep those caveats close to the claims rather than hiding them exclusively in a methodology document.
Trace the sources rather than accepting a map on trust
The public dataset page describes 1,970,745 normalized source rows, a versioned evidence projection, and the different roles played by GBIF occurrence evidence, Korea’s EcoBank survey material, a canonical national checklist and administrative boundary geometry.
The atlas does not treat every source as supporting every possible biological claim. Identity, eligible occurrence evidence, spatial assignment and publication rights remain separate layers. A record can be retained for provenance without being eligible to support a particular displayed regional claim.
The methodology outlines the derivation and evidence boundaries. The source register describes the providers and permissions without claiming that any institution endorses KoreAves.
A short walkthrough
- Open KoreAves and search for a bird in Korean, English or by scientific name.
- Use the species page to orient yourself and inspect the evidence summary.
- Open GIS to select a region and review the supporting source types.
- Use Compare for overlapping regional evidence, not an inference that two birds share a habitat or were observed together.
- Read Dataset and Methodology when you need to cite or question the versioned analysis.
KoreAves is not an observation-submission platform, an official government distribution map, or a bird abundance estimator. It is an independent, free reference designed to make existing bird evidence easier to inspect critically.
I am looking for practical corrections to taxon identities, regional evidence, translations and provenance attribution. If you find something that looks wrong, the site’s written contact and corrections route is the best way to report the precise page and supporting source.