Where our data comes from
Almost everything here is built from open data that anyone can check. This page lists each source, what we use it for, how we check it, and what the result can and can't tell you.
Sources
Every source, and how it's credited
| Source | What we use it for | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| GBIF | Species records: which species have been seen where, and in which years. 274 country downloads, each cited by its DOI. | CC0 and CC BY records only |
| OpenStreetMap | Park and reserve boundaries for most places | ODbL, © OpenStreetMap contributors |
| Wikidata, GeoNames, Natural Earth | Place names in other languages, park locations, country outlines | CC0, CC BY 4.0, public domain |
| Official park lists | Boundaries where a government publishes them (for example Australia's CAPAD and New Zealand's DOC) | As published, mostly CC BY |
| Mammal Diversity Database | Mammal names and classification | Names are facts |
| AviList and eBird/Clements | Bird names and order | Names are facts |
| Reptile Database, Catalogue of Life | Reptile and amphibian names | Names are facts |
| Our guide writers | Written species accounts (14,892 species), places our guides recommend | © Wildlife of Everywhere |
| Trip reports | Species seen on 44 published trips, used with the authors' permission | © each author, credited and linked |
| Photographers | Photos for 22,047 species, from contributors and from iNaturalist and Wikimedia Commons | Each photo keeps its own licence and is credited to its photographer |
Species accounts are written in our own words. Reference books and papers we read for facts are not reproduced.
Checks
How a record becomes a listing
- Licence check.
Only records released as CC0 or CC BY are used. Many iNaturalist records carry a non-commercial licence, so we leave them out. That means our counts are lower than the totals on GBIF's own maps.
- Record check.
Dropped: zoo and captive animals, fossils, records GBIF has flagged as having a location problem, and records whose location is more than 2 km uncertain.
- Park match.
Big parks are matched on a 1 km grid; small parks (under 10 km²) on a grid of about 100 m, so records from just outside the fence don't spill in.
- Evidence threshold.
A species is recorded at a park with 3 or more records, or records from 2 or more separate sources. One or two records are shown with a caution label.
- Escape and wanderer check.
On our "where to see" pages, a species with fewer than 5 records at a single place in a country is left out as a likely escaped pet or vagrant.
- Sensitive species.
Reptiles and amphibians are blurred to a 20 km grid. Critically Endangered and heavily trafficked species are never listed by park.
Honest limits
What this data can't tell you
- No record doesn't mean not there. A species missing from a park list may simply never have been recorded there, or recorded under a licence we can't use.
- More records doesn't mean more animals. Record counts follow people: parks with roads, lodges and birders have far more records than remote ones. Use counts to compare how well places are documented, not how common an animal is.
- Birds dominate. Birders record far more than anyone else, so birds make up the large majority of the links. Mammals, reptiles and amphibians are thinner, and threatened ones thinnest, because their locations are often hidden.
- Old records stay on the list. Each listing shows the first and last year recorded. A species last recorded decades ago may no longer be there.
- Very small parks are less reliable. For parks under about 0.1 km², a single nearby record can add a species that doesn't really live there.
- Names change. Species get split, merged and renamed. We match old names to current ones, but a few records may sit under an older name.
- "Reported by our guide" is experience, not a record. It comes from people who know the place, and is labelled so you can tell it apart.
Reuse
Using our data
The species–place links are a database derived from GBIF and OpenStreetMap, shared under the Open Database License. If you reuse them, credit “Wildlife of Everywhere, GBIF.org, © OpenStreetMap contributors”. Photos keep their own licences. Written accounts are © Wildlife of Everywhere.
This is a guide for wildlife watchers, not a research dataset. For research, go to the original records on GBIF. Developers can use the free read-only API.
Corrections
Spotted a mistake?
If a species is listed somewhere it doesn't belong, a photo is wrong or uncredited, or a photo is yours and you'd like it credited differently or removed, tell us and we'll fix it.
Send a correctionHow it worksLast updated 2026-11-05. Numbers on this page are counted from the live database each time it is rebuilt.