Truth and review trail

GitHub

Code, source metadata, licenses, object keys, public-safe manifests, and evidence.

Why

Git should stay small, reviewable, and transparent; it should not become the image warehouse.

First owned pixel store

Vercel Blob

The first 31 approved species images, public Blob URLs, and the upload manifest used by production routes.

Why

Vercel-native storage gets the encyclopedia fully owned and hosted without adding a second infrastructure provider at launch.

Operational registry

Postgres

Asset rows, variant rows, grants, reviews, checksums, stale-source state, and audit events.

Why

A database is the right layer for search, workflow state, permission expiry, and contributor operations at scale.

Application and publishing layer

Vercel

Next.js routes, reviewer UI, environment variables, Blob store connection, and production deployments.

Why

The app and first media store now live together; R2 remains the later option if high image traffic makes egress economics more important.

What they do

iNaturalist exposes supported APIs for observations and Seek uses image recognition built from iNaturalist observations and community identifications.

Blue Life move

Use as a discovery and observation-signal lane, then re-check image rights, species match, welfare context, and exact location sensitivity before public use.

What they do

GBIF indexes occurrence-linked media, supports image cache URLs, and warns that occurrence images can carry more restrictive licenses than the occurrence records.

Blue Life move

Use GBIF for broad media discovery and occurrence context, but store image-level creator, license, publisher, and confirmation state in our own approval record.

What they do

EOL provides free multilingual biodiversity information and curated structured trait data across a very large species corpus.

Blue Life move

Use EOL as a species-page and trait-source partner, while Blue Life adds public media approval, welfare framing, and action-oriented ocean context.

What they do

OBIS harvests marine occurrence records from thousands of datasets and publishes access routes for visual exploration, APIs, and large-scale analysis.

Blue Life move

Use OBIS for marine distribution, occurrence, and signal context so image pages can connect a species visual to real ocean data without exposing sensitive live locations.

What they do

WoRMS provides marine species name and AphiaID services through its REST interface.

Blue Life move

Use WoRMS identifiers as the stable marine taxon key before importing or approving images at scale.

What they do

Wild Me provides Wildbook platforms for computational photo-identification and collaboration from imagery collected by researchers, tourists, operators, and the public.

Blue Life move

Partner or interoperate where individual identification matters, while Blue Life stays focused on public species pages, rights-safe visuals, and field action context.

What they do

Wildlife Insights lets teams upload camera-trap photos, apply machine learning identification, analyze data, and explore projects.

Blue Life move

Borrow the workflow lesson: bulk image intake needs upload, machine assist, human verification, analysis, and public-safe publishing as separate stages.

What they do

FishBase exposes fish species data and picture access routes, with image reuse governed by the linked image and citation rules.

Blue Life move

Treat FishBase as a fish-specific candidate and citation lane, not an automatic public-image license.

First-choice primary media

Official and public-domain institutions

NOAA, USFWS, museums, government programs, sanctuaries

Gate

Confirm image-level credit, public-domain or license status, and whether non-agency credits require extra permission.

Fast scalable coverage

Commons and open-license media

Wikimedia Commons, iNaturalist open photos, GBIF multimedia records

Gate

Require creator, license URL, source page, species-match basis, crop approval, and blocked-surface notes.

Taxon and trait enrichment

Biodiversity knowledge networks

EOL, WoRMS, OBIS, IUCN, FishBase, SeaLifeBase

Gate

Use as source context or identifiers; do not infer image rights from data availability.

High-trust replacement images

Partner and NGO grants

Conservation NGOs, researchers, sanctuaries, photographers, field programs

Gate

Written permission must name surfaces, credit line, expiry, embargoes, and sensitive-location constraints.

Scale review without publishing mistakes

Machine-assisted intake

Candidate clustering, duplicate checks, taxonomy hints, quality triage

Gate

AI suggestions never publish directly; every public visual needs human approval and provenance.