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 threats to 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 CC0 or CC BY.

These licenses are described below:

• Creative Commons Zero (CC0) permits a data user to share, adapt and modify the work, even for commercial purposes, without asking permission (summary, full legal text) -
• Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0), which permits a data user to share and adapt material with appropriate attribution, including for commercial purposes (summary, full legal text)
• Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits a data user to share and adapt material with appropriate attribution, only for noncommercial purposes (summary, full legal text)

If data is licensed under CC BY-NC or CC BY, any use of that data requires attribution. The data provider and user are responsible for ensuring proper attribution.

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

Protect sensitive species 

Wildlife Insights will obfuscate (fuzz) the location of all deployments where any sensitive species is captured so that the exact location cannot be determined from the public data on the Explore page. Images may be available publicly, but will only be associated with the project. Wildlife Insights and Wildlife Insights Core Partners may use sensitive species data to create derived products, but will never expose the underlying location data.

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 Red List of Endangered Species 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 were removed.
• Species of local concern that don’t meet the above definition, if requested by the project owner.

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 Fuzzed in the deployments.csv 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 submitted to Wildlife Insights will be made publicly available unless it is embargoed. The images and metadata from embargoed projects will not be publicly available for the duration of the embargo period, but project metadata (e.g., project name, objectives) will be made publicly available on the Explore page. Embargo periods are measured separately for each deployment in a project, beginning on the date the first image is uploaded to the deployment in Wildlife Insights.

How to embargo data from a Project

To embargo data in a project, go to your Project Details page and enter up to 48 months in the Embargo field. You'll be prompted with an option to authorize Wildlife Insights and Wildlife Insights Core Partners to use your embargoed data for aggregated products for peer-reviewed publications. Click Save Changes. 

Note: You can view the first date your embargoed data will be released under the Embargo field.

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

Who can access embargoed data?

Apply for my project to be private

Some users may need to keep data private in order to comply with legal or cultural requirements. The following users can request an extended or indefinite embargo by selecting the Apply for my project to be private option in the Project Details tab of the project. 

• Users who belong to an Indigenous or First Nation Group
• Users who can provide a legal justification for needing to keep data private
• Users who can provide a justification for data privacy based on organizational policy

Project Owners and Project Editors can apply for a project to be private and receive an email to fill out an application for permanent privacy. The submitted application will be reviewed by the Wildlife Insights support team to verify that the request meets the Wildlife Insights policies on data privacy, and will either be approved or denied. The result of this process will be communicated by email to the Project Owner who created the project and reflected in the Project Details tab. Learn more about how to apply for a project to be private

Note: Submitting a private project request does not guarantee that your project will be approved for an indefinite embargo. 

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.  Metadata (e.g., id​​entification, 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 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, Vewer) will only have access to view the image metadata. 
   

Who can access images and metadata of humans?

Citations

Wildlife Insights automatically generates a citation for each project using the names of the Project Owners, using the following format:

References:

Author(s) (Year accessed from Wildlife Insights). Project name. DOI. Accessed via Wildlife Insights on dd-mm-yyyy.

Example: Ahumada J, Schipper J (2020). Cafe Fauna. http://n2t.net/ark:/12345/bcd987 accessed via Wildlife Insights on 03-10-2020.

In-text citations:

Example: Data used in this study were accessed from Wildlife Insights on date (Ahumada & Schipper, 2020)

To ensure you’re provided credit for the use of your data, the citation is included in each download package and on your project’s Public Details page. For additional information on citations, Wildlife Insights recommends reading GBIF’s citation guidelines.

If you’d like to override the Author names used in your citation:

• Navigate to the Project Details page and down to the Credit Line field.
• Enter the name of each author you'd like to include in the citation, using the format: Last name, First Initial Middle Initial.
• Scroll down and click Save Changes.