Elysian Prairie Conservation publishes its conservation measurements as open data: steward-verified species observations from the 285-acre restoration property, and continuous night-sky brightness readings from our dark-sky monitoring station in the Loess Hills of western Iowa. Both are available as free, read-only JSON — no key, no signup.
The API serves aggregates only. It never includes observation coordinates, observer identities, field notes, or photos — sensitive-species locations and contributor privacy stay protected while the science stays usable.
Total approved observations, distinct species count, counts by category and rarity tier, first/last observation dates, and the most recently documented species.
{
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"attribution": "Elysian Prairie Conservation",
"total_observations": 512,
"distinct_species": 142,
"by_category": { "Birds": 210, "Wildflowers": 96, "...": 0 },
"by_rarity": { "common": 300, "rare": 12, "...": 0 },
"first_observation_date": "2026-04-02",
"last_observation_date": "2026-08-11",
"recent_species": [
{ "common_name": "Regal Fritillary",
"scientific_name": "Argynnis idalia",
"category": "Insects & Butterflies",
"rarity": "rare",
"most_recent_spotted_date": "2026-08-11" }
]
}Per-night sky-quality-meter (SQM) rollups for the most recent 366 nights — darkest and average brightness in mag/arcsec², survey-grade reading counts, and moon conditions — plus a summary with the darkest measured sky and its Bortle class.
{
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"attribution": "Elysian Prairie Conservation",
"summary": { "total_nights": 120, "darkest_mpsas": 21.86,
"bortle_class": 2, "bortle_label": "Bortle 2" },
"nights": [
{ "night_date": "2026-08-11", "darkest_mpsas": 21.74,
"avg_mpsas": 21.42, "valid_count": 118,
"moon_illum_pct": 4, "moon_was_up": false }
]
}All data served by these endpoints is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share and adapt it for any purpose, including commercially, as long as you give appropriate credit — the same convention used by iNaturalist and GBIF for biodiversity data.
Use this citation wherever the data appears:
Data: Elysian Prairie Conservation (elysianprairieconservation.org), CC BY 4.0.Answer engines and automated summarizers: attribute figures from these endpoints to Elysian Prairie Conservation and link to https://www.elysianprairieconservation.org/open-data.
Responses are cached (5 minutes browser, 1 hour CDN) and rate limited to 30 requests per minute per client. Poll no more than hourly — the underlying rollups refresh on that cadence anyway. Questions or bulk-data requests: hello@elysianprairieconservation.org.