Customize how you share data

While Wildlife Insights is committed to open data sharing, we also recognize that revealing certain sensitive information may increase the risk of threat for species and that some users may wish to keep data private for a period of time. Learn how you can set controls to limit access to your datasets.

Licensing your Data

For each project, data providers may choose to license data under Creative Commons licenses:

• Images may be licensed under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-NC.
• Metadata is licensed under either CC BY or CC BY-NC.

If data is licensed under CC BY NC 4.0 or CC BY 4.0, any use of that data requires attribution. It is the responsibility of the data provider and user to ensure proper attribution.

For more information on licensing data, please see our FAQ page.

To assign a license to a project: 

1. Navigate to the Project Details page and scroll down.
2. Below the Start Date field, you'll see two fields for Metadata License and Photos License.
3. Select one of the options from the dropdown menu.

Sensitive Species

For any sensitive species, Wildlife Insights will obfuscate the location so that the exact location cannot be determined from the data. Images may be available publicly, but will only be associated with the project. Wildlife Insights and WI Core Partners may use sensitive species data to create derived products but will never expose the underlying location data.

What is a sensitive species?

Wildlife Insights is committed to sharing data for conservation purposes. However, certain species may be at-risk with the exposure of specific geographic location data. Wildlife Insights will restrict public access to exact locations of sensitive species in order to protect these species.
 

How does Wildlife Insights define sensitive species?

The list of sensitive species is defined and managed by Wildlife Insights based on best practices and expert consultations. The Wildlife Insights sensitive species list includes: 

• All terrestrial vertebrates (mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and birds) with IUCN RedList categories CR, EN, and VU and whose main threats are associated with hunting and poaching; 

• eBird’s sensitive species list, which was broadened to the species level and regionally sensitive species removed. 

• Species of local concern that don’t meet the above definition if requested by the project owner.

In the case of duplicate records between the two sources mentioned above, the eBird record is kept. *Note: the following two species were excluded due to inability to resolve to a species:

• Mount Mutis Parrotfinch (undescribed form) Erythrura [undescribed form]
• Common Diuca-Finch x Yellow Cardinal (hybrid) Diuca diuca x Gubernatrix cristata

How does Wildlife Insights protect sensitive species locations?

Wildlife Insights will fuzz the exact coordinates of all deployments set at a location where a sensitive species is captured. The fuzzed coordinates will be provided in lieu of the exact coordinates in all public downloads. 

If you are downloading public data, you can determine which deployments have fuzzed coordinates by referring to the column titled Fuzzed in the deployments.csv file provided in your download package. If the value is True, the deployment's coordinates have been fuzzed. If the value is False, the coordinates provided are the exact coordinates provided to Wildlife Insights. 

Who can access sensitive species information?

Embargoes

All data from Wildlife Insights core partners will be shared with the public when the platform is released. However, some users may want to keep data private to comply with legal requirements or to publish research. Those users will be able to embargo data for a period of up to 24 months of time. The embargo begins on the date a deployment is created and is measured separately for each deployment. A user may request up to two extensions of up to 12 months each (24 additional months for a total of 48 months per project). Project metadata will be available publicly for any embargoed projects and all images will eventually become public, unless images contain sensitive data.

To embargo data, navigate to your project details page and scroll down. Below the Credit Line field, you'll see a field with an option to embargo up to 24 months. Once an embargo is entered, you'll be prompted with an option to authorize Wildlife Insights and WI Core Partners to use your embargoed data for aggregated products for peer-reviewed publications.

For more information on embargoed data, please see our FAQ page.

Who can access embargoed data?

Images of Humans

Wildlife Insights will not knowingly provide public access to images of humans. It is the responsibility of the data provider to confirm if an image contains a human.

Wildlife Insights provides tools to remove any image containing a human from searches and will provide an option for projects to delete images of humans. Read more about how to select your project's human image privacy settings. Metadata (e.g. identification, time, location) associated with images of humans will remain publicly available on the platform.

Once a user with project level permission has confirmed that an image contains a human, Wildlife Insights will:

• Remove the image URL from public downloads
• If the project level option to delete images of humans is selected, the image will be deleted from the project's storage and will be replaced with an icon. No user with access to the project will be able to see the image in Wildlife Insights. Data providers and the public will continue to have access to the metadata of the image (i.e., identification, time taken, etc).
• If the project level option to delete images of humans is not selected, the image will remain stored in the project. Only project owners will have access to view the image. All other roles (i.e., editor, viewer) will only have access to view the image metadata. 

Who can access images and metadata of humans?