Over the past 18 months, the author's team engaged with nature practitioners, legal experts, data providers, and users to understand how nature data should be appropriately used. This newsletter shares those learnings and resources to help ecosystem participants better share or use nature data.
This is the second in a multi-part series on data sharing. The previous edition introduced nature data sharing concepts, explored challenges, and explained importance. The team also launched the Nature Data Sharing Initiative (NDSI)—a living resource collection promoting responsible and impactful data sharing among nature-focused teams.
Nature data licensing has become essential for organizations globally, from nature-tech companies building analytical models to corporations assessing nature risks. Many increasingly seek guidance on data availability and thoughtful access respecting legal, ethical, and cultural considerations.
Nature practitioners including Indigenous Peoples, land stewards, community groups, nonprofits, and private organizations want to share their data while ensuring appropriate protection and fair compensation.
Three main licensing approaches exist for publishing data:
Public dedication dedicates data to the global public domain without restrictions. Open licenses provide highly permissive terms allowing unrestricted reuse with possible conditions like attribution requirements. Bespoke terms involve negotiated party-to-party relationships with flexible uses, restrictions, and potentially commercial arrangements.
A forest data case study illustrates these concepts. Land stewards gather baseline field data before launching forest carbon projects, typically including biomass, tree metrics, geospatial coordinates, text records, georeferenced images, and metadata. This data supports forest carbon projects and helps data providers train and validate models estimating canopy cover, height, forest coverage, and living aboveground biomass.
Collecting and sharing field measurements requires careful consideration of legal and ethical dimensions. Data sharing often needs formal agreements addressing copyright, privacy, sovereignty, and ownership concerns. Multiple stakeholders and sensitive information—such as protecting Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge through Biocultural Intellectual Property Rights or obscuring endangered species locations—require particular attention. Standardized frameworks like Creative Commons licenses, NDSI templates, and GBIF best practices facilitate appropriate exchange.
Once data providers develop forest variable models, they support carbon markets and corporate reporting by improving project assessment, ensuring dynamic baselining and removals monitoring, enhancing supply chain carbon footprinting, and ensuring GHG Protocol-aligned monitoring.
Commercial users need clear terms defining data processing and analysis permissions, plus guidelines for sharing derived insights. End-user licensing agreements address commercial usage rights, attribution requirements, and revenue-sharing mechanisms. Agreements should protect traditional ecological knowledge and local community data training models from misuse. Successful relationships balance enabling valuable commercial applications while protecting original data providers' and knowledge holders' rights.
The Nature Data Sharing Initiative includes overview materials, practical sharing guides, and data sharing agreement templates. Future newsletters will explore Indigenous rights, field data significance, and other solutions for improving nature data access.
Recent partnerships noted include Cecil partnering with Google to provide Earth Engine datasets, Chloris Geospatial discussing forest carbon data for carbon markets, Kanop releasing InSAR2InSAR research for environmental monitoring, and Planet launching next-generation high-resolution satellite technology.