Juniper

Building a Wildlife Rehabilitation Resource: Technical Deep Dive

I am in the process of launching a project that's been close to my heart - a comprehensive wiki for wildlife rehabbers. As someone who's seen firsthand the challenges rehabbers face when caring for orphaned and injured wildlife, I wanted to create a centralized resource that could help save more animals. Here's how I built it and the technical decisions behind the project.

The Tech Stack

For this project, I chose React Router 7 as the foundation. The latest version brings some fantastic improvements for content-heavy sites like wikis, the nested routing is incredibly intuitive, and the new data loading patterns made it simple to organize our growing collection of care guides, medication references, and emergency protocols. The file-based routing feels natural for a wiki structure where information hierarchy is crucial.

Tailwind CSS handled all the styling needs. For a documentation site, I needed something that would provide consistent, readable layouts. Tailwind's utility classes made it easy to create a clean, professional design that works well on mobile devices, crucial for rehabbers who might be referencing guides while actively caring for an animal. The responsive utilities were particularly helpful for making complex medication tables readable on smaller screens.

Content Management with Sanity

Sanity is a favorite of mine for CMS, I love to reach for this with content-heavy sites. Wildlife rehabilitation knowledge constantly evolves as we learn better techniques, and I needed a system where experienced rehabbers could contribute and update content without touching code. Sanity's structured content approach works perfectly for our needs, each animal care guide follows a consistent schema with sections for identification, feeding protocols, medical considerations, and release criteria.

The real-time collaboration features have been invaluable. Multiple rehabbers can review and edit guides simultaneously, and the revision history gives us confidence to make updates knowing we can always reference what changed. The rich text editor handles our complex content well, from detailed feeding charts to step-by-step medical procedures.

iNaturalist Integration

One of the features I'm most excited about is our iNaturalist API integration. For each species we cover, we pull in recent community sightings from the area. This serves multiple purposes, rehabbers can see seasonal patterns of when certain animals are most likely to need help, understand the local distribution of species they're treating, and connect with the broader naturalist community.

Each sighting links directly to the iNaturalist observation page where users can see additional photos, habitat information, and community identifications. It's been fascinating to bridge the gap between the rehabilitation community and citizen scientists who are out documenting wildlife daily.

Challenges and Solutions

Building for this specific audience came with unique challenges. The site needed to load quickly even on rural connections, be readable in low light conditions (for those late-night emergency searches), and present dense medical information in scannable formats. We implemented aggressive lazy loading for images, created a high-contrast mode, and spent considerable time on information architecture to ensure critical emergency procedures are never more than two clicks away.

Content-wise, the medication guide posed particular challenges, presenting complex dosing information without making it seem like we're giving veterinary advice. I'm excited to have more experienced rehabbers contribute to this knowledge base.

What's Next

The site is live, but there's so much more to build. This project reminded me why I love building for niche communities. When you deeply understand your users' needs, in this case, exhausted rehabbers searching for information at 3 AM with a sick animal in hand, you can create something truly useful. The technical choices all served that core purpose: making critical information accessible when it matters most. I look forward to building more into this resource!

If you're interested in wildlife rehabilitation or want to contribute to the project, check out https://juniper.wiki.

And remember, if you find injured wildlife, always contact a licensed rehabber, this site is for educational purposes only!