Amazing Animals on the IUCN Red List – a massive project that I couldn’t have considered without Claude Code

This might be a long post, it was a pretty challenging project. I wrote last week about my Amazing Animals in Crisis map of 50 endangered species, I got some bad news on Friday that my usage of the IUCN polygon data was in breach of their licencing conditions and a request that I take the map down, which I promptly did. This was a big disappointment as I was just about to expand the map to almost 400 species and now I had no data. Learning – even if data is apparently free and open, carefully read the license conditions before you use it. Obvious, I know, but I had to learn the hard way. Along with the request to take down the map, there was a glimmer of good news that I could use the assessment data that I had requested for the Amazing Species as long as I correctly cited all the authors of the individual species assessments. So I had a lot of text about each species but no spatial data, how could I make a map? I briefly considered extracting the country names from the range info for…