Hosting, sharing and licencing your biological records 

Overall dataflow 

Dataflow refers to how data transfers from recorders to databases to people who wish to access these records. Each partner Wildlife Trust may be in a different position with regards to how they wish to share and use their data so there are a number of different options available. 

About the BRC

The Biological Recording Council (BRC) hosts the BRC warehouse. The BRC warehouse is a database using the indicia warehouse and hosts data from a variety of recording schemes and the iRecord recording systems, such as iRecord butterflies.

The BRC is a national focus in the UK for terrestrial and freshwater species recording. BRC works closely with the voluntary recording community, principally through support of national recording schemes and societies. The BRC is supported by the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH) and the Join Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC).

Providing that you choose to store your data with the BRC, the BRC can dedicate space in the BRC warehouse to your Nature Counts recording scheme. This means any data entered into your Nature Counts website goes into your allocated space in the BRC warehouse. Martin Harvey is the key contact at the BRC for this task. The BRC will handle periodic uploads to the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) Atlas.

You will need to sign the BRC warehouse agreement with the BRC: a written document describing a cooperative relationship between two parties wishing to work together on a project or to meet an agreed upon objective.

Martin Harvey is the person at the BRC who you will be liaising with for setting up the agreements etc. but the developer will likely be the person who creates the 'websites' and datasets on the BRC warehouse.

This is the indicia warehouse: https://warehouse1.indicia.org.uk/index.php/login

Licensing your data with Creative Commons Licenses

A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they (the author) have created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of a given work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.

Main licence options:

1. Creative Commons “No Rights Reserved” (CC0) https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ 

2. Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

3. Creative Commons Attribution non-commercial (CC-BY-NC) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

But you could specify a custom licence if none of the CC licenses are appropriate for your use case.

What are the implications? 

The issue is that the non-commercial license is a bit of a grey area with regards to what counts as a non-commercial operation. For example, local records centres are not sure if they count as non-commercial and another example is producing an atlas that uses data to make and sell a book, but probably not make much profit and rarely profit motivation. Even the research work at the BRC is a grey area as to what records they could use.

By going for the CC-BY you make sure that your records will be able to be used for all of these things but won't have the option to sell the records for their intrinsic value - you would still be able to charge for the labour for accessing and delivering those records.

If you go for the CC-BY-NC licence you could provide some written permission to a local records centre that they are allowed to use their records to avoid the grey area.

Whichever license you go for, your records still won't be available to the public on your Nature Counts page or the NBN at their original geographic resolution. When we get to sorting out the NBN upload there are options to how exact you want the geographic data to be eg. 1km 10km squares.

It is possible to change licenses at a later date but it's easier going from a more closed license like CC-BY-NC to more open licenses such as CC-BY.

Other choices on the BRC warehouse agreement

• Do you want observations publically viewable within iRecord (Yes/No). If you go to https://www.brc.ac.uk/irecord/all-records and have an irecord account you can view records that have been submitted - would you want your records to be publically viewable here?

• Observations available to the iRecord verification system (Yes/No). The iRecord verification system is a way for experts to verify records that have photos. If you say Yes then your records can be verified by experts.

• Automatic export to the NBN (Living Atlases) (yes/No): Do you want your data to automatically export to the national biodiversity network atlas?

Data on the warehouse

In setting up your Nature Counts site a number of things will be set up on the BRC warehouse 

• 'Website': this identifies where the data on the warehouse has been submitted from. You will have a warehouse ID, eg SRWT's website id is 119 and you need this ID for configuring a number of the webpages on the NC sites.

• 'Datasets': these are collations of records with the same structure. For example every Nature Counts site will have a 'general records' dataset which are for records entered on the generic 'enter a casual record' or the 'enter a list of records'. When a new custom survey form is created, the survey builder automatically creates a new dataset. When you're downloading records you can select a particular dataset. 

• 'Locations': these are polygons for all the various nature reserves, project sites or personal recording sites.

• 'Occurrences' (organised into 'samples'). Individual records are occurrences, when you enter a list of records you are entering a 'sample'.

Sharing your data on the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) Atlas

Getting set up as a data partner

https://docs.nbnatlas.org/share-data-with-the-nbn-atlas/become-a-data-partner/

In order to share your data with the NBN Atlas you will need to be set up as a data partner. By submitting datasets you are automatically agreeing to the NBN Atlas Terms of Use. If you gave permission for your datasets to be transferred from the NBN Gateway (the previous data sharing website) to the NBN Atlas, then you should already be set up as a data partner. A list of data partners can be found on the NBN Atlas.

If you are a new data partner, please email data@nbnatlas.org with the following information:

• Your organisation name

• Name and email address of a contact person for the organisation

• Your logo

• A representative photo for the organisation

• Organisation address

• A link to your website

• A short (~10 word) description

• A longer (~100 word) description

These can be updated very easily at any time.

SRWT's data partner page: https://registry.nbnatlas.org/public/show/dp239

Getting Nature Counts records to be added as a data resource to the NBN Atlas

Contact Martin Harvey at the BRC to arrange this.

You will need to complete a spreadsheet that provides the dataset information. See example below:

Data will be uploaded inline with the NBN data processing schedule https://nbnatlas.org/nbn-atlas-data-processing-schedule/

Note about General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) & biological recording

We cannot contact our biological recorders for marketing purposes because we do not explicitly ask about marketing when they sign up to submit records to your database. If you want to use the recording site as a marketing tool then you should collect marketing permissions through another way. For example, the customer relationship management (CRM) software we use at Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust called Donorfy provides an embeddable widget to ask for marketing preferences. This widget does not enter any data into the recording website but connects directly to Donorfy then subsequently connects with our marketing tools such as mailchimp.