Hello everyone, I have started researching to create a distributional review of a specific insect group for Greece. I would like to publish this work at some point. Many of the observations I was planning of including come from iNaturalist, most of them with CC-BY-NC licensing. I want to add them as points on some maps I will be preparing. Do I need to obtain permission from each observer before using the observations as occurrence data, or is proper attribution and citation in a supplementary table sufficient? I am asking because, the observations are in the thousands , so contacting every observer individually would be extremely difficult,
If anyone had experienced a similar situation and can guide me on how to approach this, it would be much appreciated!
IIRC the GBIF dataset has lower accuracy than the iNat RG dataset, as GBIF includes obs that were RG due to errors and have since been corrected, not just current RG obs
Some taxa have suffered from large numbers of faulty RG IDs in the past
It is updated to add new RG obs, but are obs that are no longer RG removed from the GBIF data? I thought it only added new ones and did not remove anything.
July 2019 posts from dnnyboy (Daniel Noesgaard), who worked at GBIF
We take the full dataset every 7 days and during ingestion we only process records that are new or updated. Records that are bumped from research-grade to casual are (presumably) removed from the dataset we access and thus deleted from GBIF during ingestion.
For the record, the good iNat folks control what goes in the dataset that we ingest. If they add/update/delete a record, we do the same when ingesting. I know that only research-grade records go in the dataset we ingest, but there might be other filters applied.
Isn’t the licensing primarily for image use? We’ve recently done what you suggest to show ranges in an upcoming paper. Checking with each observer would have been a daunting task, and since the map was county level, some counties had multiple observations. Historically range maps have been based on data from multiple sources, and most data points are not individually credited. Looking at it from the other side, I’m fine with any of my data would be used in this way. The only time I’d expect credit would be if I contributed a large portion of the data used, and that would go into the general credits. And what happens to my data when I’m no longer involved? I’d hate to see it become useless. For anyone who disagrees (it would be fine with me if they did), at some point more precision becomes impractical. Knowing that many Lycosid specimens in collections are incorrectly identified, and that iNat observations may have incorrect information, I should recheck every preserved specimen and contact every observer to confirm. I’ll only do that when the datum is an outlier and I think it important.
As others have noted, I don’t think this would be correct, except if there’s been a recent clean-up or something that isn’t yet reflected in the most recent GBIF upload.
“If you plan to publish a paper using iNaturalist data, we recommend downloading iNaturalist data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility because they will issue a citable DOI (see this FAQ for more details).”
You can look up the terms of the license (in fact there should be a link when the license is named)! BY means that you need to give attribution, and NC means that it’s for non-commercial use. If you want to use it for commercial purposes, you would need to ask for permission.
Observations also have licenses. The default is CC-BY-NC. I think one of the reasons to get the data via GBIF is that then you don’t have to worry about crediting each individual observation (which would be absurd in many cases), because GBIF takes care of it.
I am confused as to what content is actually licensed by the observation license
As I understand it, even “all rights reserved” works (so C not CC) can be cited as sources for information (eg, X species is known from Y location), and CC licenses never apply any additional restrictions beyond those of “all rights reserved”
This raises the question of what the observation license applies to, If the fact that X species is known from Y area can be referenced regardless of license, and the photo is covered by the photo license (not the observation license) I cannot figure out what the observation license applies to.
There are a fair amount of threads with discussions about this already on the forum. A couple examples (though there are links to others in these as well):