Governance

Governance

WildlifeStats is a research framework, and a framework that handles wildlife rehabilitation data needs an explicit account of what it holds, who can see it, and how individuals and organizations are protected. This page sets out that account: the access model, the privacy policy, the partnership path, and how to cite the work.

The four-tier data framework

Access to data is organized in four tiers of increasing detail and increasingly strict control.

• Public. The tier you are reading. It carries only aggregate, suppression-aware figures and, at present, a synthetic dataset. Anyone may use it without an account.
• Partner. Reserved for contributing wildlife rehabilitation centers, who can see their own records alongside aggregate national context. Access requires a partnership agreement.
• Research. De-identified record-level data for approved research use, governed by a data-use agreement that specifies purpose, retention, and re-disclosure limits.
• Surveillance. The most sensitive tier, intended for public-health and wildlife-health partners who need timely signals. Access is the most tightly held and is out of scope for the current build.

Only the public tier exists today, and it is deliberately the least sensitive: nothing on it can be resolved to an individual case or a single contributing organization.

Why the dataset is synthetic, and why no real centers are named

The dataset published here is generated, not collected. It is produced from regional distribution models calibrated against published wildlife rehabilitation literature, and it is labeled as synthetic on every page that presents it. The Methodology page describes exactly how it is built, including the seed and the build command, so that any figure can be reproduced.

Using synthetic data for the public tier is a privacy decision, not a shortcut. It lets the framework demonstrate national-scale analysis — the maps, the seasonal patterns, the cross-species views — without exposing any real center's records or implying claims about specific places. For the same reason, no real wildlife rehabilitation center is named on the public tier. When real data is contributed under the partner tier, the governing agreement, not this page, sets the terms under which a center may be identified.

Privacy and suppression policy

The public tier follows a privacy-by-construction rule: it ships only figures that have already been aggregated, and small groups are withheld. Any download from the data interface applies k-suppression — rows representing fewer than ten records are collapsed into a single "Suppressed (n<10)" line carrying only their combined count. This prevents a small, potentially identifying cell from being read off the public surface. Outcome information is presented in aggregate only; there are no individual patient records on this site, synthetic or otherwise.

How a wildlife center could partner

The framework is designed to accept records from many independent centers and to standardize them into a common schema — the process the ingestion methodology page demonstrates. A contributing center retains ownership of its records. The framework normalizes, aggregates, and publishes only what the partner agreement permits, and a center can see its own data in national context without that data becoming public. Centers interested in the partner model can follow the project as the partner tier is built out; the public site will note when partner onboarding is open.

Citing WildlifeStats

If you reference this work in academic or policy writing, please cite it as: WildlifeStats: a national wildlife rehabilitation research framework (synthetic dataset, version 1.0.0), 2026, https://wildlifestats.org/. Because the dataset is reproducible from a committed seed, please include the dataset version so readers can match figures to the exact build. The public dataset is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.