Data is owned by the Organization that submits the content. Wildlife Insights does not own the data but is granted a license to use data for purposes outlined in the Terms of Use.  

Wildlife Insights provides tools including artificial intelligence models for species identification, automated statistics and a cloud-based platform to easily share camera trap data.

Wildlife Insights is provides all of these tools in one place, making it easy for decision-makers to access the information they need to protect wildlife. 

Wildlife Insights provides access to camera trap data collected by hundreds of data providers across the world. These data providers retain ownership of their camera trap data and use Wildlife Insights as a means to process and share the data. 

Anyone can sign up for a Wildlife Insights account. After signing up, you'll automatically have access as a Registered User.

Registered Users have access to the Explore page to browse and download projects. Data accessible for public download on the Explore page is only made available after certain restrictions are implemented to protect sensitive species and address other privacy concerns. These measures include:

• obfuscating (blurring) the exact location of any deployment in an effort to limit access to sensitive species;
• removing all images of humans from public pages and downloads; and
• limiting access to embargoed data (i.e., images and deployment information). Public users may view details associated with an embargoed project, such as the project name, objectives and organization name, but will not be able to download data from the embargoed project.

Users who are approved as Data Contributors can create projects and upload camera trap data to Wildlife Insights. To apply to upgrade your account to a Data Contributor, please submit an application.

Wildlife Insights encourages users to share their data publicly, but also recognizes that there may be reasons to keep data private for a short period of time or longer.

For data providers who want to publish their data, Wildlife Insights will provide the option to embargo data before the data 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.

Note: By signing the Terms of Use, you provide Wildlife Insights and Wildlife Insights' core partners permission to use your data, including embargoed and private data, to develop derived products. These derived products may be displayed on the Wildlife Insights website or used in presentations, for example, but will not be used in peer review publications without your consent. Derived products using private data will also not be publicly shared without your consent.

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

Wildlife Insights runs on the Google Cloud Platform, which implements rigorous security practices to protect against unauthorized access. Click on the following links to learn more about Google Cloud security:

• https://cloud.google.com/security/infrastructure/
• https://cloud.google.com/security/overview/
• https://cloud.google.com/security/overview/whitepaper

In addition to the Wildlife Insights security measures provided by the Google Cloud Platform, the Wildlife Insights application provides additional security and protection via HTTPS. HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is an internet communication protocol that protects the integrity and confidentiality of data between the user's computer and the site. Data sent using HTTPS is secured via Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS), which provides three key layers of protection:

• Encryption—encrypting the exchanged data to keep it secure from eavesdroppers. That means that while the user is browsing a website, nobody can "listen" to their conversations, track their activities across multiple pages, or steal their information.
• Data integrity—data cannot be modified or corrupted during transfer, intentionally or otherwise, without being detected.
• Authentication—proves that your users communicate with the intended website. It protects against man-in-the-middle attacks and builds user trust, which translates into other business benefits.

Wildlife Insights will not knowingly display or enable the download of images of humans in the public database. However, a record of the image (i.e., the date, time, identification) will be available for download. Within a user’s private workspace, images of humans may be stored, hidden or deleted by the user.

Wildlife Insights encourages users to share their data publicly, but also recognizes that there may be reasons to keep data private for a short period of time or longer.

For data providers who want to publish their data, Wildlife Insights will provide the option to embargo data before the data 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.

Note: By signing the Terms of Use, you provide Wildlife Insights and Wildlife Insights' core partners permission to use your data, including embargoed and private data, to develop derived products. These derived products may be displayed on the Wildlife Insights website or used in presentations, for example, but will not be used in peer review publications without your consent. Derived products using private data will also not be publicly shared without your consent.

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

Wildlife Insights encourages users to share their data publicly but also recognizes that data providers may also want to publish their data before sharing. In these cases, Wildlife Insights will provide an option to embargo data for up to 48 months before data 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.

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 that option in the 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

Anyone who downloads data from Wildlife Insights must agree to the Terms of Use and provide their contact information and intended use of the data. The Terms of Use allow a user to share data and images in accordance with certain Creative Commons licenses.

Data available to the public will never include the exact location of sensitive species, images of humans or embargoed or private project data.

While Wildlife Insights is committed to open data sharing, we recognize that revealing the location for certain species may increase their risk of threat. To protect the location of sensitive species, Wildlife Insights will obfuscate, or blur, the location information of all deployments capturing sensitive species so that the exact location of a deployment containing sensitive species cannot be determined from the data.

Wildlife Insights will fuzz the exact coordinates of all deployments set at a location where a sensitive species is captured. Each coordinate will be truncated to 0.1 decimal degree (~11km). The fuzzed coordinates will be provided in lieu of the exact coordinates in all public downloads. Wildlife Insights will also hide the Location Name and will randomize the Deployment ID so that this information cannot be used to determine a location.

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. 

Practices to obfuscate the location information associated with sensitive species may be updated from time to time with feedback from the community.

Wildlife Insights runs on the Google Cloud Platform, which implements rigorous security practices to protect against unauthorized access. Click on the following links to learn more about Google Cloud security:

• https://cloud.google.com/security/infrastructure/
• https://cloud.google.com/security/overview/
• https://cloud.google.com/security/overview/whitepaper

In addition to the Wildlife Insights security measures provided by the Google Cloud Platform, the Wildlife Insights application provides additional security and protection via HTTPS. HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is an internet communication protocol that protects the integrity and confidentiality of data between the user's computer and the site. Data sent using HTTPS is secured via Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS), which provides three key layers of protection:

• Encryption—encrypting the exchanged data to keep it secure from eavesdroppers. That means that while the user is browsing a website, nobody can "listen" to their conversations, track their activities across multiple pages, or steal their information.
• Data integrity—data cannot be modified or corrupted during transfer, intentionally or otherwise, without being detected.
• Authentication—proves that your users communicate with the intended website. It protects against man-in-the-middle attacks and builds user trust, which translates into other business benefits.

All projects licensed under CC BY or CC BY-NC require a data user to provide attribution. Wildlife Insights makes it easy to provide attribution by providing a list of data citations for each project in a download request. Projects in Wildlife Insights are also assigned an Archival Resource Key (ARK), which is a persistent, permanent link to a project and dataset. Please refer to the projects.csv file to view the recommended citations and licenses for the projects in this download. Wildlife Insights suggests citing projects 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. https://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)

For additional information on citations, Wildlife Insights recommends reading GBIF’s citation guidelines.

Wildlife Insights follows Creative Commons standards for licensing, which provide guidelines for how data should be shared and distributed.

For each project you create you will be prompted to assign Creative Commons licenses separately to the metadata and images. When your data is downloaded, you will receive a notification of the download with the user’s contact information and objectives for using the data. The user will also be provided with the Creative Commons license assigned to your data. It is up to the data user and provider to ensure the data is appropriately attributed.

Projects in Wildlife Insights are also assigned an ARK (Archival Resource Key), which is a persistent, permanent link to a project and dataset. The ARK is a link back to the project's public page on Wildlife Insights. Wildlife Insights recommends including the ARK in each citation.

If your data is used, WI will provide attribution as required by the Creative Commons license assigned to the data. 

Creative Commons provides standardized licenses that make it easier for people to choose how their work is shared. For each project, data providers may choose to license data under Creative Commons licenses:

• Images (recorded data) may be licensed under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-NC.
• Metadata may be licensed under either CC 0 or CC BY.

These licenses are described below:

• Creative Commons Zero (CC0) permits a 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)

We've highlighted the most frequently asked about sections of the Terms of Use in this summary.

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

• Images (recorded data) may be licensed under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-NC.
• Metadata may be licensed under either CC 0 or CC BY.

These licenses are described below:

• Creative Commons Zero (CC0) permits a 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)

By agreeing to the Terms of Use, you grant Wildlife Insights the right to use your data* for certain purposes including:

• The aggregation of wildlife data (i.e., summaries of data at a biome, national, global, or species level);
• The promotion of standardized protocols and best practices;
• The management of data and the provision of indicators;
• The generation of insights and visualizations for conservation action;
• Posting on Wildlife Insights social media accounts**;
• Creating publicity materials for Wildlife Insights**;
• Developing or improving computer vision models only for the purpose of advancing technology related to conservation;
• Developing derived products for use in online forums, presentations, and peer-reviewed publications***.

*Including data on sensitive species, provided the use does not expose geographic location data.

**All of the mentioned uses will be with attribution to you. If your project has been approved for Private status, Wildlife Insights will request your permission before using any data for public material.

***Derived products may be produced by Wildlife Insights or a Wildlife Insights’ core partner. Wildlife Insights will not publish derived products that include your embargoed or private data in peer-reviewed publications without your consent. Derived products using private data will also not be publicly shared without your consent.

Wildlife Insights will not knowingly display or enable the download of images of humans in the public database. However, a record of the image (i.e., the date, time, identification) will be available for download. Within a user’s private workspace, images of humans may be stored, hidden or deleted by the user.

Derived products are aggregations of data, summary statistics and information products, including charts, maps or graphs. Wildlife Insights may produce derived products to provide the public with timely information that captures large-scale biodiversity trends. In order for these metrics to be relevant and effective, the inclusion of recent or even near-real-time information is key. Wildlife Insights endeavors to support this need while respecting the data privacy terms of your dataset and ensuring data attribution.

If your data is used, WI will provide attribution as required by the Creative Commons license assigned to the data. 

Wildlife Insights provides an option for data providers to embargo their data for up to 48 months. You may request an extension by emailing [email protected]. Extension requests will be reviewed and approved on a case-by-case basis by Wildlife Insights. The embargo period applies to the entire project but is measured separately for each deployment (i.e., a unique placement of a camera in space and time).

Embargoed data will not be available to users outside of your project. However, the metadata of any embargoed project will still be available in the public database. 

Note: By signing the Terms of Use, you provide Wildlife Insights and Wildlife Insights' core partners permission to use your data, including embargoed data, to develop derived products. These derived products may be displayed on the Wildlife Insights website or used in presentations, for example, but will not be used in peer review publications without your consent.

You may remove unintended image uploads, deployments, subprojects, cameras and locations if you are a user with appropriate permissions. Only the Project Owners or Editors may remove project data (images, deployments, subprojects and locations), and only the Organization Owners may remove cameras from Wildlife Insights. To remove other data, please send a request to [email protected].

If your account is deleted, your data will remain in the Wildlife Insights database. Your public data will remain accessible to other users and your embargoed data will remain embargoed through the end of the embargo period. If you are an organization administrator and delete your account, you will be prompted to assign another user to the administrator role.

We will have to provide you with ninety days’ notice of our intention to terminate services. Third-party sub-licensees working on improving computer vision models may still have indefinite access to your data, but only for the purpose of advancing technology related to conservation and for no other reason.

Any data published on Wildlife Insights may be used by Wildlife Insights to develop aggregated data products, including global analyses. Wildlife Insights may use these analyses to produce annual reports on the state of wildlife.

While Wildlife Insights is committed to open data sharing, we recognize that revealing the locations of certain species may increase their risk of threats. 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. Public downloads will also hide the Location Name and randomize the Deployment ID for all public downloads, so this information cannot be used to determine the exact location of a deployment.

If you are downloading public data, you can determine which deployments have fuzzed coordinates by referring to the Fuzzed column 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.

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 a project owner.

While Wildlife Insights is committed to open data sharing, we recognize that revealing the location for certain species may increase their risk of threat. To protect the location of sensitive species, Wildlife Insights will obfuscate, or blur, the location information of all deployments made available for public download so that the exact location of a deployment containing sensitive species cannot be determined from the data. Practices to obfuscate the location information associated with sensitive species may be updated from time to time with feedback from the community.

By agreeing to the Terms of Use, you grant Wildlife Insights the right to use your data* for certain purposes including:

• The aggregation of wildlife data (i.e., summaries of data at a biome, national, global, or species level);
• The promotion of standardized protocols and best practices;
• The management of data and the provision of indicators;
• The generation of insights and visualizations for conservation action;
• Posting on Wildlife Insights social media accounts**;
• Creating publicity materials for Wildlife Insights**;
• Developing or improving computer vision models only for the purpose of advancing technology related to conservation;
• Developing derived products for use in online forums, presentations, and peer-reviewed publications***.

*Including data on sensitive species, provided the use does not expose geographic location data.

**All of the mentioned uses will be with attribution to you. If your project has been approved for Private status, Wildlife Insights will request your permission before using any data for public material.

***Derived products may be produced by Wildlife Insights or a Wildlife Insights’ core partner. Wildlife Insights will not publish derived products that include your embargoed or private data in peer-reviewed publications without your consent. Derived products using private data will also not be publicly shared without your consent.

Projects that are embargoed are not available for public download for the duration of the embargo. A project owner or editor may embargo their project for several reasons. For example, the project owner or editor is writing a publication with the data and wants to publish it before making the data public.

If a project is embargoed, the images and metadata are not available for public download through the Explore page. The project will still be visible on the Explore page, and project metadata will be available(e.g., project objectives, methodology).

Private projects are projects with extended or indefinite embargoes. All images and metadata from private projects will never be made publicly available or be publicly discoverable on the Explore page.

Project Owners and Project Editors can request a project to be private by selecting the Apply for my project to be private option in the Project Details tab of the project if they meet the following criteria:

• 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

Wildlife Insights encourages users to share their data publicly, but also recognizes that there may be reasons to keep data private for a short period of time or longer.

For data providers who want to publish their data, Wildlife Insights will provide the option to embargo data before the data 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.

Note: By signing the Terms of Use, you provide Wildlife Insights and Wildlife Insights' core partners permission to use your data, including embargoed and private data, to develop derived products. These derived products may be displayed on the Wildlife Insights website or used in presentations, for example, but will not be used in peer review publications without your consent. Derived products using private data will also not be publicly shared without your consent.

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

Wildlife Insights promotes sharing information for the benefit of biodiversity conservation. We recognize however, that data providers may want to publish their data before making it public.

Wildlife Insights will provide the option to embargo data for a limited period before the data is made public. 

By agreeing to the Terms of Use, you grant Wildlife Insights the right to use your data* for certain purposes including:

• The aggregation of wildlife data (i.e., summaries of data at a biome, national, global, or species level);
• The promotion of standardized protocols and best practices;
• The management of data and the provision of indicators;
• The generation of insights and visualizations for conservation action;
• Posting on Wildlife Insights social media accounts**;
• Creating publicity materials for Wildlife Insights**;
• Developing or improving computer vision models only for the purpose of advancing technology related to conservation;
• Developing derived products for use in online forums, presentations, and peer-reviewed publications***.

*Including data on sensitive species, provided the use does not expose geographic location data.

**All of the mentioned uses will be with attribution to you. If your project has been approved for Private status, Wildlife Insights will request your permission before using any data for public material.

***Derived products may be produced by Wildlife Insights or a Wildlife Insights’ core partner. Wildlife Insights will not publish derived products that include your embargoed or private data in peer-reviewed publications without your consent. Derived products using private data will also not be publicly shared without your consent.

Derived products are aggregations of data, summary statistics and information products including charts, maps or graphs. Wildlife Insights may produce derived products to provide the public with timely information that captures large-scale biodiversity trends. In order for these metrics to be relevant and effective, the inclusion of recent or even near-real time information is key. Wildlife Insights endeavors to support this need, while respecting the data privacy terms of your dataset and ensuring data attribution.

Anyone who downloads data from Wildlife Insights must agree to the Terms of Use and provide their contact information and intended use of the data. The Terms of Use allow a user to share data and images in accordance with certain Creative Commons licenses.

Data available to the public will never include the exact location of sensitive species, images of humans or embargoed or private project data.