Chuck

A desktop application for browsing biodiversity occurrences in DarwinCore Archives (DwC-A), with an added option to create DwC-As from iNaturalist.

Features

• view occurrences in DarwinCore Archives with occurrence cores, including tabular, image, and map views
• filter occurrences by most of the available fields
• view archive metadata files (eml.xml and metadata.xml)
• create DarwinCore Archives from iNaturalist records, with
  • date filtering
  • user filtering
  • embedded photos
  • authentication so you can include coordinates you have permission to see
  • CLI (e.g. cargo run -p chuck-cli -- obs --user kueda --d1 2026-01-01 --d2 2026-02-01 --format dwc)

Status

Under active development, hoping to get some builds up for testing in early 2026. Still very rough in terms of... well in terms of everything.

Shooting for a 1.0.0 release that views DarwinCore Archives from GBIF, Symbiota, and iNat (via Chuck) and is capable of creating a backup of my (fairly expansive) iNat contributions.

Tech

Chuck is a Tauri application where most of the logic is in Rust. Data is stored and queried via DuckDB. SvelteKit is used for the front-end along with Skeleton and Tailwind.

Setup

If you want to work on Chuck or just build it, you mostly just need working Rust and NPM environments. Building looks roughly like this:

# Install Rust: https://rust-lang.org/tools/install/
# Install Node / NPM: https://docs.npmjs.com/downloading-and-installing-node-js-and-npm
# Clone this repo

# (Optional) Use the right version of node (fnm works well on windows)
nvm use

# Install JS deps
npm i

# Run the test suite, which will also install Rust deps
npm test
# wait a long time while duckdb compiles

# Run a development build w/ debug output
npm run tauri-debug

Background

Chuck primarily grew out of a desire to back up my iNat observations in a standard, portable format like DwC-A, but frankly, a backup isn't that useful if you don't have an easy way to view what's in it, and a viewer has the added potential benefit of providing offline functionality in case you're traveling to places without Internet access and want an iNat-like or GBIF-like reference.