Suggestions for Improvement to the eBird 1.1 API

• See this comment on making the regional hot spot lookup provide a filtering mechanism to show only hot spots with recent data.
• In the header for XML results, we should add a warehouseDate to indicate when the last refresh occurred on the primary warehouse from which the result is based. This will let consumers decide whether or not they should expect recent data to show up in the result or not.
• Add location name to header of location based API results. Allows a "gadget" to display the location name in the case where no results were returned. Return comma delimited list for requests with multiple loc_ids. [Let's find another mechanism to handle the lists, since we can't guarantee that names won't have commas in them. - Paul]

Suggestions from mobile app developer A.B. (6/2/2011)

Facilitate getting more data at once:

• All API calls which return Bird sightings should respond sightings for more than last 30 days. Maybe a year? This is so we could download more sightings and save in our DB.
• All API calls which return Bird sightings should have optional attributes ‘date from’ and ‘date to’. For example, obsDtFrom (in JSON format) obs-dt-from (in XML format). Using this attribute we may get sightings for certain period of time and we can use this as update to sightings users already have.

General suggestions:

• API call responding with the list of all sightings for all species for selected region.
• API call responding the list of all hotspots for selected region.
• API call responding the list of rare birds for selected region.