Terms of use

Using the site

You may read, search and share anything here freely, and link to any page without asking. Automated access is fine if it is gentle — please use the open data export at /api/sightings rather than scraping the map, since it is faster for you and cheaper for us.

Do not use the site to submit false records, advertising, or anything unlawful, and do not attempt to interfere with it or with other people's use of it. Anonymous submissions are reviewed before publication, and we may decline or remove any of them.

What submitting a sighting means

By submitting a sighting you confirm the observation is genuine and yours to share, and that any photograph you attach is your own or is one you have the right to publish.

You keep ownership of what you submit. You grant us a licence to publish it on this site and to include it in the openly licensed dataset described below — which, being open, cannot be withdrawn from people who have already downloaded it. Ask us and we will remove a record from the site and from future exports.

The data licence

Sighting records collected here are published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, adapt and redistribute them, including commercially, as long as you credit Alitaptap.

Records that originate from iNaturalist carry their own contributors' licences and remain those contributors' work; each links back to the original. Species photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and from iNaturalist under the licences their photographers chose, and are credited where they appear. The site's own text, design and code are not covered by the data licence.

Accuracy, and what a map cannot promise

This is citizen science. Records are contributed by people, identifications can be wrong, and locations are as precise as whoever logged them made them. We take real care — obscured coordinates are excluded, submissions are reviewed, and the guided identification says when it does not know — but nothing here is guaranteed to be correct or complete.

So: do not rely on this site as the sole basis for a decision that matters, whether that is a research finding, a land-use choice, or a long drive to see fireflies on a particular night. The site is provided as it is, without warranties.

Advertising and affiliate links

The site carries advertising, which is chosen and served by Google, not by us. We do not review individual advertisements and their presence is not an endorsement.

Some links on the shop page are affiliate links, meaning we may earn a small commission if you buy something after following one. This never changes the price you pay. Items are listed because they suit firefly-watching — a red-filtered torch does not spook the insects the way a white one does — not because of what they pay.

Going outside

Firefly watching happens at night, often on uneven ground, sometimes near water. You are responsible for your own safety, for having permission to be where you are, and for leaving the habitat as you found it. Do not trespass, do not collect the insects, and keep your lights off and low.

Changes

These terms may change as the site does. The revision date at the top of this page is when they last changed meaningfully, and continuing to use the site after that means accepting the current version.