Citation and Licensing

The Cave Biology Data Portal is intended to be cited. This page explains how to cite an individual species account or the dataset as a whole, and what you may do with the material.

License

Text and data on this site are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, redistribute, adapt, and build upon them for any purpose, including commercially, provided you give appropriate credit and indicate whether you made changes.

That covers the species accounts, the distribution and conservation data, and the taxonomic framework. It does not cover photographs and illustrations, which are treated separately below.

Photographs and illustrations

Images are All Rights Reserved unless the image itself states otherwise. Good photographs of obligate cave species are scarce and difficult to obtain, and most of those here were made specifically for this portal.

Some images are released under a Creative Commons license at the photographer’s discretion. Where that is the case, the license appears alongside the image, and those terms govern. Where no license is shown, assume All Rights Reserved.

Images on this site come from several sources. Some are our own; others are contributed by photographers and researchers who retain copyright in their work and license their images to us for use here only.

The credit line shown with each image names the copyright holder. To reuse an image, write to info@cavebiology.org with the species, the intended use, and where it will appear. Where the image is ours, we can usually grant educational and non-profit use at no cost, and commercial licensing is handled through Niemiller Nature LLC. Where the copyright belongs to someone else, we will pass your request on or put you in touch, but the decision is theirs.

Citing a species account

Species accounts are versioned and individually attributed. Cite the account, not the site as a whole:

Niemiller, M.L. 2026. Cambarus laconensis Buhay & Crandall, 2009. Cave Biology Data Portal, account SP-1163, version 1.0. https://cavebiology.org/species/cambarus-laconensis/ (accessed 28 August 2026).

Every account displays a ready-to-copy citation at the foot of the page. Where an account has been assigned a DOI, cite the DOI in preference to the URL.

Citing the portal

Cave Biology Data Portal. 2026. Niemiller Nature LLC. https://cavebiology.org (accessed [DATE]).

Third-party data

Some information is drawn from other sources and remains subject to their terms. Where you reuse it, cite the original:

  • Conservation ranks and rank reasons from NatureServe and its member programs
  • Red List categories, criteria, and assessment text from the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species
  • Listing status from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
  • Taxonomic identifiers from the Catalogue of Life, GBIF, ITIS, iNaturalist, NCBI Taxonomy, WoRMS, and Wikidata
  • Sequence data from GenBank and BOLD

Contributing an account

Species accounts may be written by outside contributors, who are credited by name and ORCID and hold authorship of the text they write. By contributing, you agree that your account may be published under the site license. See the Contribute page, or write to info@cavebiology.org.

Last updated: This page was last updated on 28 August 2026.