I would like to use a screenshot from iNat in a paper

General
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I think requiring explicit permission like this is what journal and book publishers normally do, because for them there’s a serious chance of being sued for using any content that someone else has copyright to without permission (probably technically including anything with a “© Google” in the corner of the map). So maybe this particular professor is trying to follow best legal/ethical practices by doing the same thing.

In reality I don’t think people usually worry about using Google Maps screenshots in much of anything that’s not going to be for sale (or otherwise a major publicly-available product). But in this case I assume it’s going to depend on how much of a stickler your professor wants to be about the technicalities as they understand them.

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Thanks for that great summary! Just one thing: The screenshot in this thread isn’t using Google’s “satellite” layer, but its “terrain” layer. I’m guessing that’s mostly based on NASA SRTM data, but I don’t know what also Google might have added/done to it that might satisfy the originality criterion (they at least processed it to generate the hillshade…).

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Might be overachieving for your purposes but it would be a cool exercise to use the iNat data export utility to get the location data and explore rendering your own custom maps, which could draw upon many interesting and additional basemap sources, and/or context overlays like environmental correlates etc