What you need to know about nature data licensing
Passing on our learnings to support better nature data sharing
Welcome to the Nature Data Newsletter. Each month, we share insights with data enthusiasts, GIS experts, and investors learning about nature data.
Over the past 18 months, we've worked with nature practitioners, legal teams, data providers, and data users to understand considerations for the appropriate use of nature data. This newsletter shares our learnings and a resource to help anyone in the ecosystem better share or use nature data.
This is the second edition in our multi-part series on data sharing. Our previous newsletter introduced the concept of nature data sharing, explored its challenges, and explained its importance. We also launched the Nature Data Sharing Initiative (NDSI) - a living collection of resources to promote responsible and impactful data sharing among teams working on nature.
Who’s involved in nature data licensing today?
Nature data licensing has become crucial for organisations worldwide - from nature-tech companies building models to support with site-level analysis for corporations making decisions on nature risks. Many of these organisations increasingly have questions about data availability and thoughtful access that respects legal, ethical, and cultural considerations.
Similarly, nature practitioners such as Indigenous Peoples, land stewards, community action groups, nonprofits, and private organisations are looking to share more of their data while also ensuring it is appropriately protected and/or that they are appropriately compensated.
What are the different licensing approaches?
In general, there are three main licensing approaches for publishing data with different benefits and considerations:
Public dedication: data is dedicated to the global public domain with no restrictions;
Open licence: highly permissive licence that allows unrestricted reuse but may include conditions such as a requirement to attribute the data holder; and
Bespoke licence terms: named party-to-party relationship negotiated with flexible permitted uses and/ or restrictions, including commercial terms if relevant.
Case study: Licensing forest data
In our last newsletter, we introduced a forest data sharing use case involving land stewards and data providers. Today we also introduce the potential use of the data provider's model in a corporate reporting, and outline the licensing considerations for all parties.
Field measurements for model training
Land stewards gather baseline field data before launching a forest carbon project. This data typically includes biomass and tree metrics, geospatial coordinates, text records, georeferenced images, and other relevant metadata.
This field data serves multiple purposes: it provides evidence for forest carbon projects and can support data providers in training and validating their models. For example, field measurements serve as inputs and benchmarks for models that estimate various forest metrics — canopy cover, canopy height, forest cover, and living aboveground biomass. Examples of these provider datasets can be found in Cecil's documentation.
When collecting and sharing field measurements, it is important to carefully consider the legal and ethical dimensions involved. Data sharing often requires formal agreements or licenses between data owners and users. These agreements help address key issues such as copyright, privacy, sovereignty, and ownership. By navigating these considerations thoughtfully, both parties can ensure compliance and build trust in the data-sharing process.
This is particularly crucial in situations with multiple stakeholders and sensitive information, such as protecting Indigenous Peoples’ traditional ecological knowledge through Biocultural Intellectual Property Rights (BCIPR) or obfuscating location data of endangered species. Standardised frameworks like Creative Commons licenses for open data sharing, the sample template in NDSI for open or commercial data sharing, and frameworks guiding best practices like GBIF’s on sensitive species occurrence data can be utilised to appropriately facilitate this exchange.
Corporate reporting
Once a data provider develops a model for forest variables, it can support a wide variety use cases in carbon markets and corporate reporting of supply chain emissions and removals by:
Improving project assessment and due diligence
Ensuring effective dynamic baselining and removals monitoring
Enhancing supply chain carbon footprinting by going beyond deforestation monitoring and working with spatially explicit carbon dynamics
Ensuring GHG Protocol aligned forest carbon removals monitoring
When corporate and commercial users, such as data analysts and sustainability managers, utilise nature data, additional considerations and safeguards are required. These users need clear terms that define how the data can be processed and analysed. It is also important to establish guidelines for how any derived insights can be shared.
End-user licensing agreements play a key role in addressing these requirements. These agreements should cover commercial usage rights, data attribution requirements, and potential revenue-sharing mechanisms. By implementing these safeguards, organisations can ensure responsible and transparent use of nature data.
In this example for the forest carbon analysis, the agreement should also outline how the traditional ecological knowledge and local community data that trained the model will be protected from misuse. For these relationships to thrive, the parties must strike a balance between enabling valuable commercial applications while protecting the rights and interests of the original data providers and knowledge holders.
The Nature Data Sharing Initiative
If you want to keep learning about nature data sharing, please see the Nature Data Sharing Initiative (NDSI). NDSI is a collection of resources designed to promote data literacy and foster a culture of responsible, impactful data sharing among teams working on nature.
NDSI includes the following key resources:
Overview: An introduction, overview, and guidance notes around nature data and Nature Practitioners’ field data;
Guide: A guide on practical steps for sharing data;
Template: A data sharing worksheet and sample data sharing agreement template.
If you’d like to contribute your expertise to this initiative, please reach out to us at alex@cecil.earth.
In future newsletters, we'll continue our focus on data sharing by exploring topics such as the significance of indigenous rights and field data, and offer other practical solutions for improving access to nature data.
Notices
Cecil + Google are partnering to provide Google Earth Engine (GEE) datasets on Cecil's nature data platform. Learn more.
Chloris Geospatial share how their datasets empower organisations in carbon markets with trustworthy forest carbon data. Watch here
Kanop release groundbreaking research on the innovative InSAR2InSAR model—a leap forward for accurate environmental monitoring. Learn more.
Planet’s next generation, high-resolution satellite and 36 SuperDoves has arrived at Vandenberg Space Force Base ahead of next month’s launch. Learn more.
Thank yous
A special thank you to everyone who supported us this month with feedback, introductions, and advice.
Adam Weiner, Coby Strell, David Marvin, Danielle Rappaport, Elaine Mitchell, Florian Reber, Gregg Treinish, Helen Crowley, Kevin Webb, Mac Bryla, Matthias Mohr, Nate Trappe, Noah Golmant, Peter Levine, Romain Fau, Syakira Syafiqah, Sylvain Vaquer, Tom Quigley, and Wade Cooper.
Keep reading
This newsletter is curated by Cecil, a team on a mission to make nature data accessible. Their platform helps data teams access analysis-ready commercial and public nature datasets, eliminating the need for cleaning, harmonising, and pre-processing tasks. Whilst currently focused on aboveground biomass, they will soon launch land cover and land use datasets to support market-leading nature-tech applications, consultants, and nature restoration professionals.
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