DATA PRIVACY POLICY - Species360

DATA PRIVACY POLICY

Data Ownership: All Species360 Members own their specific animal data and have the right to request a comprehensive copy of their data at any time. Species360 does not provide an individual members’ specific data to any other parties. If requested by a government entity for an individual member’s data, we refer that request to the member if legally permissible. And we never provide or share a member’s data, unless it is aggregated with other members’ data, and anonymized at a species or higher level.

Purpose: Species360 is a non-profit NGO. We do not profit from the data. We do look for opportunities to support and fund animal care and conservation efforts, including the ongoing development of the Species360 Zoological Information Management System (ZIMS) and our conservation science initiatives. Our activities allow us to expand our funding sources beyond our membership fees, which generally provide 95% of our total operating budget. Fundraising activities help us maintain a membership fee structure that is not cost-prohibitive to institutions wanting to join. We use funding sources such as grants, sponsorships, and occasionally fee-for-service models to ensure our ongoing organizational financial viability, and to ensure we can provide increasingly valuable services to our 1,300 institutional members in 101 countries, and to the broader zoological and conservation community.

The Species360 Conservation Science Alliance is a collation of experts in the zoo and aquarium community, NGOs, and academia that work together to harness the value of ZIMS data to serve animal care and conservation science. The Alliance is funded by research grants, sponsors, partners, and members enabling the team of researchers to extract data from ZIMS, and aggregate and anonymize it for the purposes of scientific research. More information is available here.

Oversight By Board of Trustees: Our Board of Trustees is a large, diverse representation of our members, and reviews and approves all new member and data research requests. Aggregated data is a critically important resource in the development of global reports/analyses in which members and researchers can investigate how their animals or populations compare to a global mean. We develop the analytics to provide this valuable aggregated knowledge. Per our bylaws, the Species360’s Board of Trustees is chartered with ensuring responsible use of Species360 aggregated and anonymized member data. The stated goal is to use data to advance wildlife care, welfare and conservation science. Our Membership Agreement, signed by each member, as well as any other system use agreements provide further transparency, for example: “Institution at all times remains the owner of Institution’s Content. Member’s data will only be used by Species360 at an aggregated/anonymous level.” And “Species360 may, however, disclose to third parties, information, and data once it has been aggregated and/or anonymized and is not directly linked with any specific Institution.”

Anonymized Data: ZIMS contains over 330 million animal records accumulated during our 48-year history. This presents unique value to advancing wildlife care and conservation research. We periodically receive research requests from outside researchers. Each research request is initially reviewed and approved by our Research Committee, a subgroup under our Board of Trustees. That Research Committee then provides guidance for the Board’s final approval of the research request. These requests are typically completed without any fee to the researcher unless the request requires additional resources to retrieve, clean, or analyze the data before being provided to the researchers. In those more complex cases, a nominal fee may be required. Researchers are required to appropriately cite the use of our members’ data in their work product.

View the Species360 Citation Guidelines here.

DATA SHARING FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE, ANIMAL CARE AND CONSERVATION

Over nearly 50 years, the contributions of Species360 members have created the world’s largest database on animals under human care. We strive to make these data available to support all those who want to conserve species, improve animal care, and advance science. We also work to process and analyze these data to provide critical information to our members and the conservation community.

As part of this vision, we support researchers and members around the globe by:

Supporting the work of the Species360 Conservation Science Alliance to transform ZIMS data, aggregate it with other unique and open data sets, to support animal care and species conservation.
Supplying select data through a research request.
Providing free and openly available aggregated and anonymized data through the Species360 Conservation Science Alliance Open Data Portal.
Providing free and openly available research by publishing open-access research papers.
Helping members use data in the Zoological Information Management System (ZIMS) to advance wildlife conservation.
Expecting Species360 and our members to be acknowledged for the amazing data they collect and share in ZIMS.

Species Holdings Data

Species holdings data include the number of living individuals and their location at our member institutions. You do not need a formal Research Request to access these data. For inquiries, please contact support@species360.org

Species360 Insights Program

The Species360 Insights Program provides researchers with access to anonymized, aggregated data in ZIMS. For more information, please see our Species360 Insights Program webpage.

Research Requests

If you would like to submit a research request to use ZIMS data, please click here to learn more about the procedure. You can complete a Research Request through this link. Any email communications should be directed to support@species360.org.

Global Medical Resources Reports

With support from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS) (grant #MG30-14-0039-14),

Species360 has utilised decades of veterinary experience and aggregated medical data to develop Global Medical Resources to help put zoological veterinary professionals at the forefront of advanced animal healthcare.

These resources are:

Anesthesia Summaries – the most commonly used injectable protocols for over 1,600 species, drugs and dosages used, and complications.
Drug usage extracts – summaries of usage for a specific drug or drug category within a taxonomic group.
Morbidity and Mortality Analysis – common clinical problems and relevant death information by species. Search by diagnosis report locally or globally to learn what diagnoses have been reported for a taxonomic group.
Expected Test Results – regularly updated calculations to aid with interpretation of laboratory data. Over 13 million standardized test results records generate reference intervals for over 1,100 species.

For more information about Species360 Global Medical Resources, please email support@species360.org

For more information on Species360’s data sharing policy and data request procedures, please click here.