WildScout

Where the data comes from

WildScout decides how rare an animal is by reading real occurrence records — the same public biodiversity data scientists use. It does not guess, and nobody hand-assigns rarity.

Sources

• GBIF — the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, which aggregates the records below.
• eBird / the Cornell Lab of Ornithology — the EOD Observation Dataset, CC BY 4.0. The large majority of the bird records WildScout uses were counted by eBird volunteers.
• iNaturalist contributors who chose CC0 or CC BY licensing for their observations.
• Great Backyard Bird Count, USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, university natural-history collections, and other GBIF publishers.

What we exclude

WildScout uses only records licensed CC0 or CC BY — the licences whose owners permit commercial use. Observations licensed CC BY-NC are excluded entirely, because their contributors asked that they not be used commercially.