Bug Brief shipped with Peekabug 1.1.4 on September 9, 2026. Drag the map anywhere, pick a month, and you get a small report: how many species have been recorded there, how many are new to you, which ones are only found there and not near your home, and which ones to keep away from. This note is about where every one of those numbers comes from, because a number with no source is a decoration.
The source
Every count is built from iNaturalist community observations of insects and arachnids that have reached research grade, meaning the community agreed on the identification. We ask iNaturalist for the species recorded in an area during a given month, ranked by how many observations each species has. The area is either a radius around a point (20, 40, 100 or 200 km) or a whole named place such as a country or a state, when you searched for one.
The month matters. A brief for Kyoto in April is built from observations made in April, in any year. That is what makes “peak is June to August” a fact rather than a guess: it is the shape of the observation histogram across the twelve months.
What each number means
- Recorded this month: the number of species with at least one research-grade observation in that area in that month. This is a count of records, not of everything that lives there.
- New to you: species on that list that are not in your collection yet.
- Only found here: species on the destination list that do not appear on the list for the 40 km around your home. It is a comparison of two record lists, not a claim about range.
- Keep away from: species on the list that match our caution list, which is 13 genus groups (widows, recluses, hornets, fire ants, bark scorpions and so on) plus 42 species we have checked by hand. If a species is not on that list, we say nothing about it. We do not let the model guess.
The list behind each brief covers the most-recorded species, up to a thousand. In busy places that is not everything, and the app says so at the bottom of the list.
Three things we refused to show
Zeros. iNaturalist rate-limits shared infrastructure, and our proxy runs on shared infrastructure. Early builds sometimes got a partial answer and cheerfully displayed “Off season. Peak is January.” for a place in the middle of summer. Now, if the histogram request fails, the brief fails too and asks you to try again. A missing number is better than a wrong one.
Populations. A park next to a university looks far busier than a remote forest, because more people with phones walk through it. The brief counts what people have recorded. It is a good proxy for what you can expect to find, and it is honest about being a proxy.
Photos we are not allowed to use. Species photos in the brief are shown only when the observer licensed them CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, with the observer credited. Everything else gets our own pixel art instead.
What is free
Your local brief, the 40 km around home, is free forever, and so is every safety note in every brief anywhere. Peeka Pro opens the full lists and pins for the rest of the map. That split is deliberate: the part that keeps you safe is never behind the paywall.
If you find a brief that looks wrong, tell me. The front desk reads every message.
