pondlog

Place-aware nature data aggregation. What's happening in nature at these coordinates right now? Pondlog stitches together free public APIs — iNaturalist, eBird, USA-NPN, USGS, Mushroom Observer — plus local astronomy computation (astronomy-engine) and NOAA tides/cloud cover into a unified data layer with two interfaces:

• A CLI for humans (pondlog inat nearby --lat 48.118 --lng -123.43)
• An MCP server per source for AI agents (Claude Desktop, Cursor)

By Andrew Christison.

Packages

Package	npm	What it does
pondlog		Unified CLI
@pondlog/core		Shared types, Result<T>, rate limiter, utils
@pondlog/source-inaturalist		iNaturalist API client
@pondlog/source-ebird		eBird API client (21 endpoints)
@pondlog/source-npn		USA-NPN phenology client
@pondlog/source-usgs		USGS Water Services client
@pondlog/source-nightsky		Local night-sky briefing (astronomy-engine)
@pondlog/source-mushroomobserver		Mushroom Observer (mycology) client
@pondlog/source-trefle		Trefle.io plant taxonomy client
@pondlog/mcp-inaturalist		iNaturalist MCP server (9 tools)
@pondlog/mcp-ebird		eBird MCP server (21 tools)
@pondlog/mcp-npn		NPN MCP server (8 tools)
@pondlog/mcp-usgs		USGS MCP server (4 tools)
@pondlog/mcp-mushroomobserver		Mushroom Observer MCP server (5 tools, mycology-first)
@pondlog/mcp-garden		Garden-planning MCP server (5 tools — first plant/garden MCP on any registry)
@pondlog/mcp-pondlog		Aggregate MCP server (5 tools, all eight sources)

Status

Quick start

As an AI agent (MCP)

Add to your Claude Desktop config (~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json on macOS):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pondlog-inaturalist": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pondlog/mcp-inaturalist"]
    }
  }
}

Then ask Claude:

What amphibians have been seen near Port Angeles, WA in the last week?

The same JSON works in ~/.cursor/mcp.json for Cursor.

As a human (CLI)

npm install -g pondlog
pondlog config set-location --lat 48.118 --lng -123.4307 --name "Port Angeles"
pondlog inat nearby
pondlog ebird notable
pondlog npn active
pondlog usgs flow --site 12045500
pondlog nightsky                       # tonight's curated briefing

--json works on every command for machine output.

Design principles

• One data layer, two interfaces. Each source is a typed library (Zod-validated, rate-limited, returns Result<T>). The CLI and MCP servers are thin wrappers — no business logic.
• Degrade gracefully. When a source is down, the aggregate still returns whatever else worked, with errors reported in-band.
• Rate limits respected. Each client throttles itself; never trust the caller.
• No keys for what doesn't need them. iNaturalist, NPN, USGS, and the night-sky source all run keyless. Only eBird requires a key (EBIRD_API_KEY).
• Local computation when the data isn't external. Astronomy is pure math — @pondlog/source-nightsky ships zero network calls, zero rate limits, zero failure modes.

Repository

pondlog/
├── packages/
│   ├── core/                    Shared types and utilities
│   ├── source-inaturalist/      iNaturalist client library
│   ├── cli/                     `pondlog` CLI
│   └── mcp-inaturalist/         MCP server for AI agents
├── docs/
│   ├── ARCHITECTURE.md
│   ├── METHODOLOGY.md
│   ├── API_AUDIT.md
│   ├── STICKIES.md
│   └── SESSION_HANDOFF.md
├── CHANGELOG.md
└── README.md

Contributing

PRs welcome. The build is pnpm-based:

git clone https://github.com/andrewschristison/pondlog.git
cd pondlog
pnpm install
pnpm typecheck
pnpm build
pnpm test
pnpm smoke   # live tests against iNaturalist

Each package follows a strict pattern documented in docs/METHODOLOGY.md. Source clients always ship before the CLI commands or MCP tools that consume them.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.