Where every image here comes from

No image is published on this site until its source, licence, species identity, attribution requirements, and permitted use have each been verified against the individual source and licence page. When rights or species identity are uncertain, the image is not published.

That rules out anything awaiting permission, anything of unknown origin, anything lifted from a search result, news site, commercial publication, social account, organisation page, or photographer’s portfolio without a documented reusable licence, anything restricting redistribution or commercial use, and anything justified only by an assumption of fair use. Hotlinking to images hosted elsewhere is not used.

An image is never described here as public domain, CC0, or royalty-free unless its own source page says so. Where an image is an illustration rather than a photograph, the page says so plainly and does not present it as a record of a real animal.

Species ambassadors are original artwork created for this project. They are educational characters, never documentary photographs, and are never recorded or presented as third-party wildlife photography. Each is labelled as an illustration wherever it appears, and each keeps the real species’ anatomy, colouring and habitat.

80 of the 80 species records carry a documentary photograph. Each entry below was checked against the photograph’s own file-information page: what it shows, who made it, where it is held, its licence, the attribution it requires, and any change made to the file. Every file is stored on this site; none is hotlinked.

• Wikimedia Commons file-information pages — licence, creator, description and categories checked file by file
• U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service photographs and Service Flickr uploads mirrored on Commons
• NOAA Fisheries, National Park Service, USGS and Bureau of Land Management public-domain photographs mirrored on Commons
• USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab specimen photography
• Texas A&M University vascular plant image collection (OakTrust repository)
• The New York Botanical Garden C. V. Starr Virtual Herbarium, with the file-level licence taken from the garden's own published image record
• iNaturalist observation photographs, accepted only where the contributor chose a reusable licence and the file page names the exact species
• Creative Commons photographs by named photographers, accepted only under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA