OpenContext

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Audubon IBA MCP — a National Audubon Society Important Bird Areas fork of OpenContext (forked from the San Diego City GIS fork). It serves Audubon's public IBA feature service through the audubon_iba plugin.

Where the sibling GIS forks front a whole portal or services directory, this one fronts one fixed FeatureServer with a known schema. There is nothing to crawl, so the catalog-discovery machinery is gone: no search_datasets, no get_aggregations, no catalog manifest, no dataset-id resolution. What carries over is the ArcGIS REST plumbing — WGS84 handling, coded-value domain decoding, pagination, and error surfacing.

An IBA is a conservation priority, not a legal status. IBA designation is science-based (BirdLife/Audubon criteria, ranked Global / Continental / State). It carries no legal or regulatory force: it does not protect land, restrict its use, or trigger permitting, and the boundaries are advisory rather than authoritative property lines. This server states that in its MCP instructions, in its tool descriptions, and in a footer on its output.

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The data source

https://services1.arcgis.com/lDFzr3JyGEn5Eymu/arcgis/rest/services/iba_polygons_public/FeatureServer

  layer 0   iba_polygons_public  -- the main IBA polygon record
  tables    3 criteria_site    4 criteria_species   5 habitat   6 landuse
            7 observation      8 ownership          9 site_description
           10 species         11 threat

Public and key-less. Layer 0's fields, coded-value domains, record cap (2000), and relationship ids are read from the service at runtime (?f=json) and cached — nothing is hardcoded beyond the fields the tools actually name.

Sites are addressed by site_id (e.g. 1004 = Anchorage Coastal), which you get from search_ibas or find_ibas_near_point.

The WGS84 contract

The polygons are authored in EPSG:3857 (Web Mercator). Every query sets inSR=4326 and outSR=4326, so all tools take and return WGS84 lat/lng and the service reprojects server-side. Without inSR, a WGS84 point would be read as Web Mercator metres and silently match nothing. find_ibas_near_point adds a server-side buffer (distance + units=esriSRUnit_Kilometer) rather than computing geometry client-side.

Pagination is metadata-driven: maxRecordCount is read from the service, and both /query and /queryRelatedRecords page with resultOffset/resultRecordCount.

Tools exposed

Tool	Purpose
audubon_iba__find_ibas_near_point	"Which IBAs are near here?" — buffers a WGS84 lat/lng by radius_km and returns every IBA polygon it intersects
audubon_iba__search_ibas	Attribute search: state (name or two-letter code), priority (Global/Continental/State), flyway, name (case-insensitive substring). Output leads with TOTAL MATCHING, so "how many IBAs in X?" needs no paging
audubon_iba__get_iba_details	The full polygon record for one site_id, leading with ebird_link
audubon_iba__get_iba_related_records	The tables behind a site, by category: species, criteria, criteria_species, habitat, landuse, ownership, threat, observation, description
audubon_iba__list_distinct_values	Cheap enum discovery for a field (flyway, iba_priority, iba_eba, iba_status, …) so you can filter on an exact value instead of guessing

Workflow: fetch the polygon record first, then pull a related table only when the question needs one — species/criteria for why it was designated, threat/ownership/landuse for stewardship context, habitat for ecosystem, observation for history.

ebird_link is the integration point. It pre-joins each IBA to its eBird hotspot/region. For recent or live sightings, surface that link (or chain to an eBird MCP server) rather than reporting the stale observation table.

Connect to the server

Add it as a custom connector in Claude (same steps on Claude.ai and Claude Desktop):

1. Settings → Connectors (or Customize → Connectors on claude.ai)
2. Add custom connector
3. Name it e.g. Audubon IBA and paste your deployment's /mcp URL.

Quick health check from a terminal:

curl -sS -X POST http://localhost:8000/mcp \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"ping"}'
# → {"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"result":{"status":"ok"}}

Raw JSON-RPC example:

curl -sS -X POST http://localhost:8000/mcp \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call",
       "params":{"name":"audubon_iba__find_ibas_near_point",
                 "arguments":{"lat":61.17,"lng":-149.9,"radius_km":40}}}'

Verified end-to-end

The definition-of-done is a two-step chain around Anchorage (61.17, -149.9): a 40 km buffer search, then a related-record traversal on a site it returns. Together they prove the WGS84 buffer contract and the site_id → objectid → queryRelatedRecords chain (the relationship id is not the related table's id, and queryRelatedRecords keys on objectid, not site_id).

// audubon_iba__find_ibas_near_point
{ "lat": 61.17, "lng": -149.9, "radius_km": 40 }

returns six Alaska IBAs — Anchorage Coastal, Campbell Creek, Goose Bay, Palmer Hay Flats, Susitna Flats, Swanson Lakes — each with its priority rank and ebird_link. Traversing one of them:

// audubon_iba__get_iba_related_records
{ "site_id": 1004, "category": "species" }

returns the birds Anchorage Coastal was designated for (Short-billed Dowitcher, Snow Goose, Hudsonian Godwit, Sandhill Crane).

scripts/smoke_prod.py runs both plus eight more checks against any deployment:

python scripts/smoke_prod.py                             # production
python scripts/smoke_prod.py http://localhost:8000/mcp   # local

Data use

The endpoint is public, but Audubon routes formal reuse of the spatial data through a request process. Ad-hoc display and analysis in conversation is fine; anything beyond that should go through Audubon.

Local development

uv sync                              # or: pip install -r requirements.txt
python scripts/local_server.py       # serves http://localhost:8000/mcp
python -m pytest tests/ -q           # tests

On Windows, set PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8 before local_server.py (it prints emoji).

See CLAUDE.md and docs/ for architecture, deployment, and plugin development.