Customize how you share data

While Wildlife Insights is committed to open data sharing, we also recognize the need to protect certain sensitive information. 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 may be 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 Wildlife Insights 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.

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

Wildlife Insights is committed to open data sharing. All data on Wildlife Insights will be shared with the public (with the exception of sensitive data) unless the project is embargoed. Embargoes offer the opportunity to keep project data private for a period of time before it is made public.

Embargoed data will not be available to the public for the duration of the embargo, but project metadata (e.g., project name, objectives) may be shared with the public. The embargo begins on the date a deployment is created and is measured separately for each deployment. Read more about embargoed data in our FAQs.

To set an embargo:

1. Go to your project details page and scroll to the Embargo field;
2. Enter the number of months that you want to embargo your data. The maximum number of months is 24. You can request an additional 24 month embargo (for a total of 48 months) by contacting Wildlife Insights at [email protected];
3. 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. 
4. Scroll down the page and click the green Save Changes button.

Who can access embargoed data?

Images of Humans

Public Access

Wildlife Insights will not knowingly provide public access to images of humans. However, a record of the image (i.e, the date and time taken, identification of the image) will be available to the public via the public download feature. 

It is the responsibility of the data provider to confirm if an image contains a human. Once a human identification is confirmed, Wildlife Insights will:

• Remove the image URL from public downloads;
• Restrict access to the image on any public facing page.

Private Access

Within a user’s private workspace, images of humans may be stored or deleted, depending on project preferences.

Read more about how to set a project's Human Image Delete setting.

Once a human identification is confirmed, Wildlife Insights will:

• Delete the image if the Human Image Delete setting is enabled. No one with private access to the project will be able to see the image. 
• Store the image if the Human Image Delete setting is disabled. Only Project Owners will have access to view the image. All other users with private access to the project will only be able 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. To ensure you’re provided credit for use of your data, the citation is made available in each download package and on your project’s Public Details page.

To customize the Author names used in your citation:

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