About
Understory is an independent project. The idea came from someone who spent a career in public earth science, working out how natural events unfold and what people would need to know when they do. One person built it and keeps it running.
The Church of the Seasons
There is no church, no congregation, and nothing here to believe.
The name is a small joke about a serious habit. There is a long tradition of people who kept weather diaries, counted the same birds on the same morning every year, pressed leaves between pages, and wrote it all down for no reward beyond knowing. Whole communities have been founded on the conviction that close attention to the natural world is a civic good, and have built schools and libraries and surveys to prove it.
Understory continues that habit rather than any doctrine. The seasons are what it watches. The fellowship is everyone else who notices.
It was called Bird Consciousness for a while. That was funnier and considerably less clear, though it named the point out loud: the hope is that you leave noticing more than you arrived with, and that the same street looks different on the way home.
What this is, plainly
Understory reads public scientific data about one small area and reports what is unusual about it today. It keeps no accounts, asks for no login, and stores no location history against any person. Saved places live in your own browser and never reach the server.