Sources and credits

UK Species Inventory. The species names and classification used in the species finder and on the numbers page. Chris Raper (2014). UK Species Inventory - Simplified Copy [Data set]. Natural History Museum. https://doi.org/10.5519/0070624. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. The finder shows which release it uses.

PhyloPic. The silhouettes in the species finder. Each drawing is credited to the person who drew it, with its licence, under the drawing itself. phylopic.org

Wikidata. Used to match silhouettes to UK species. Public domain (CC0); credited as a courtesy.

Wyke Farm Ltd. The farm's species records and surveys, shown with the farm's permission and credited to Wyke Farm Ltd.

What happens when terms have not been read

Licences change, and a dataset that looked free to use last year can carry new conditions this year. A source whose terms have not been read recently is not used until they have been, whatever use it might otherwise be put to.

Some material used here is not covered by an open licence at all. Where an organisation holds something outside those terms and has agreed to let it be shown, that agreement is recorded against what it covers and the date it was given, and nothing beyond what it covers is used. Where no such agreement exists, the material simply is not shown, whatever else might be available from the same organisation.

Permission for one use isn't permission for another

An agreement covering one photograph or one dataset does not extend to another from the same organisation, and it does not extend past the date it was given. Treating permission as a standing arrangement rather than a specific one is how a page ends up showing something it was never allowed to show, so each use is checked against what was actually agreed rather than against what seems likely to be fine.

A licence tells you what you may do with somebody's work and what it asks of you in return. Most of the organisations behind UK wildlife data publish theirs freely, but the wording still needs to be read before anything drawn from it appears next to a species, a place or a figure on this site.

Non-commercial use and attribution

This site sells nothing and carries no advertising. Where a licence limits use to non-commercial purposes, the data appearing here does so on that basis, and that basis is part of what makes the data available at all. The obligation that comes with it is straightforward: credit the source in the words its licence sets out, keep that credit wherever the data is shown, and read the terms again if they change. Anyone checking a figure against the organisation that published it, on the species, places or how is it going pages, is following the same terms this site works under.