These Terms of Use (“Terms”) govern your access to and use of the Chorus platform (“the Platform”) hosted by WildMon (“the Platform Provider”). They form an agreement between you and the Platform Provider. By registering for or using the Platform, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, you may not use the Platform.

If your upload is covered by a data governance agreement, that agreement also applies to your data. Some data contributed to the Platform is subject to a separate data governance or data-sharing agreement between the contributor (or their community or organization) and the Platform Provider, which sets out rights over the data and the Platform Provider's stewardship commitments. These Terms and any such agreement are meant to work together. Where the two conflict, the applicable data governance agreement prevails with respect to the data it covers. Users whose uploads are not covered by such an agreement are governed by these Terms and by any separate data arrangement applicable to their project.

1. About the Platform

Chorus is a web-based tool for the analysis of passive acoustic monitoring data. It allows Users to upload audio recordings, run automated and assisted analysis, review and validate results, and manage access to their Data and the outputs generated from it. Where an upload is subject to a data governance agreement, the governance of that Data is set out in the applicable agreement (see Section 13.1).

2. Definitions

For the purposes of these Terms:

1. “User” or “you” — any individual or organization registered on the Platform, including field participants, data reviewers, and project coordinators.
2. “Platform Provider” — hosts the Platform and acts as the designated processor and custodian of Data uploaded to it.
3. “Organization” — a private, community, or institutional entity registered on the Platform. Each Organization designates at least one account owner who manages its Users and Projects.
4. “Project” — a defined monitoring effort with a specific objective and geographic scope. An “Individual Project” is owned by a single User; an “Organization Project” is owned by a registered entity.
5. “Your Data” — the raw audio you upload or make available through the Platform.
6. “Derived Data” — data generated by processing recordings on the Platform, including detections, annotations, validations, classifications, confidence scores, metadata, summary statistics, and labeled audio segments. It excludes the raw continuous recordings as uploaded.
7. “Metadata” — descriptive information associated with Your Data or Derived Data, including deployment location and dates, device information, recording parameters, taxonomic identifications, validation status, and contributor names, roles, and affiliations.
8. “Data” — Your Data, Derived Data, and Metadata together.
9. “Owner” — the individual (for Individual Projects) or legal entity or community (for Organization Projects) that owns the Data.
10. “Sensitive Data” — Data whose unrestricted disclosure could pose risks to species or ecosystems, including (a) detections or precise localities of species classified as sensitive by recognized authorities (e.g., eBird, xeno-canto, IUCN Red List), and (b) detections or localities the Owner designates as sensitive for reasons of local safety or cultural significance.

3. Acceptable Use

You agree not to:

1. Upload or transmit content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, harassing, defamatory, or otherwise objectionable, or that violates another person’s intellectual property, privacy, or other rights;
2. Modify, tamper with, or interfere with the Platform’s software, appearance, or functionality;
3. Interfere with other users’ access to the Platform, including by uploading viruses, malware, or other harmful components; or
4. Use the Platform to collect or process data in violation of applicable law, including data protection law or the rights of Indigenous and local communities.

The Platform Provider may take appropriate action, at its discretion, to prevent misuse, terminate accounts that violate these Terms, or comply with applicable law.

4. Your Representations and Warranties

By uploading Data, you represent and warrant that:

1. Authority and ownership. You are the Owner of Your Data, or an authorized representative of the Owner with express legal authority to upload it and to accept these Terms on the Owner’s behalf. Where the Owner is an Indigenous or local community, you have authority under that community’s own governance systems to do so.
2. Organizational authority. If uploading to an Organization Project, you have authority to act for and bind that Organization.
3. Legal compliance. Your Data was collected in compliance with applicable law — including data protection and environmental law and any obligations regarding prior consultation with Indigenous or local communities — and you hold all required permits.
4. Accuracy. To the best of your knowledge, Your Data and Metadata are accurate and unedited.
5. Minimum metadata. You will provide the minimum metadata required for identification, attribution, and quality control, including deployment location and dates, device information, and contributor names.
6. No harmful content. To the best of your knowledge, Your Data contains no viruses, malware, or other harmful components.

5. Data Ownership

Uploading Data to the Platform does not transfer ownership of it to the Platform Provider.

1. Ownership stays with the Owner. For Individual Projects, the Owner is the User who created the project. For Organization Projects, the Owner is the entity on whose behalf it was created, whether or not it is a registered legal entity. Where an Organization represents an Indigenous or local community, ownership vests in the community collectively, in accordance with its own governance systems.
2. Platform Provider as processor. The Platform Provider acts as a data processor and custodian. This does not grant it any ownership interest, though it permits the limited permissions in Section 6.
3. Transfer of control. For Organization Projects, if an individual User’s access ends, control of the Data remains with the Organization.
4. Documentation. The Platform records the designated Owner in Project metadata and preserves that information in all exports.

Where an upload is subject to a data governance agreement, ownership and community-control matters may be addressed in more detail in that agreement, which prevails with respect to the Data it covers.

6. Rights in Your Data

You keep your rights. Uploading Data to the Platform does not transfer your rights in it. You retain all ownership and intellectual-property rights in Your Data.

Permission to operate the service. The Platform stores and processes Data only in response to actions you or the Owner initiate. So that it can do so lawfully, you grant the Platform Provider a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free permission to store, copy, process, analyze, and display Your Data solely to provide the Platform’s features to you and at your direction — for example, holding your recordings, running the analyses and model training you request, showing your Data and results back to you, and producing the exports you initiate. This permission exists only to operate the Platform for you and for no other purpose. It is not a license for the Platform Provider to use Your Data on its own initiative.

7. Your Access to Your Data

Derived Data and Metadata. You may download Derived Data and Metadata generated from Your Data through the Platform at any time, free of charge, including detection records, validation results, and deployment metadata.

Validated audio clips. Audio clips associated with validated detections are made available through the Platform for review and download, subject to Section 8.2.

Raw audio. To manage the storage and transfer costs of large raw audio files, the Platform does not offer bulk self-service download or return of Your Data once uploaded. You are strongly advised to retain your own copies of Your Data at the point of upload; that copy is the authoritative one. The Platform Provider does not guarantee ongoing retention of raw audio and may delete it without notice, as described in any applicable data governance agreement. If a copy is required later, you may submit a written request, which the Platform Provider will honor only while it still holds the data and where doing so is technically feasible on its side, on a cost-recovery basis and with a cost estimate provided beforehand.

8. Privacy and Sensitive-Species Controls

8.1 Default privacy

Access to Your Data, Derived Data, and Metadata within the Platform is private by default. The Project Owner controls who is granted access and may extend it to any individual or organization, including external experts invited to support validation or analysis. The Platform Provider will not grant access without the Owner’s authorization, except as required to operate the Platform or by law.

8.2 Sensitive species

Project Data may include species classified as sensitive (see Section 2). Sensitive-species Data is subject to the same access controls as the rest of the Project’s Data and remains private within the Platform. You are responsible for exercising care when sharing or publishing results, outputs, or Data that include sensitive-species information outside the Platform.

9. Withdrawal and Deletion

You may remove Your Data from the Platform at any time by contacting the Platform Provider.

1. What this achieves. The Platform Provider will stop processing Your Data, and the permission to operate the service in Section 6 ends when Your Data is removed.
2. What it cannot achieve. Removing Your Data does not by itself unwind Derived Data or other outputs already generated through operations you initiated; the retention and use of those outputs are governed by any data governance agreement applicable to the Data. Where the Owner has separately shared or published Derived Data outside the Platform, removal does not affect copies already distributed to or downloaded by third parties.

10. Participant Safety and Personal Data

10.1 Incidental capture of human speech

Recording units deployed for biodiversity monitoring may incidentally capture human speech. The Platform does not intentionally collect, analyze, or process human speech, and you agree not to use it for that purpose.

10.2 Personal data

The personal data you provide on registration (such as name and email) is used solely to operate the Platform, manage your participation, and attribute your contributions. The Platform Provider processes personal data in accordance with its Privacy Policy and applicable law, and implements appropriate safeguards for international transfers, including to its systems and those of its service providers.

10.3 Attribution and crediting

You control attribution. Contributor attribution is controlled by the User through the contributor field in each Project’s metadata. By adding names to that field, you confirm that you have the permission of the people named to credit them. You may choose to anonymize contributors — for example, using a group-level acknowledgment in place of individual names — or to leave the field empty. You may edit this field autonomously, as many times as needed, and changes carry through to future outputs.

Crediting of validation and annotation. Where Users perform validation or annotation work through the Platform, that work is credited to them in the exports that include it.

11. Disclaimers and Limitation of Liability

11.1 Platform provided “as is”

The Platform is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis. The Platform Provider makes no warranties, express or implied, regarding uptime, performance, fitness for a particular purpose, or freedom from errors or interruptions.

11.2 Accuracy of AI-generated outputs

Species classifications and other AI outputs are probabilistic and may include false positives and negatives. They are intended to support, not replace, expert review, and should be validated by qualified reviewers before being relied upon for conservation decisions, regulatory submissions, publications, or other consequential uses.

11.3 User-submitted content

The Platform Provider is not responsible for the legality, accuracy, or appropriateness of content submitted by Users. Users bear sole responsibility for ensuring their submissions comply with applicable law and the warranties in Section 4.

11.4 Third-party service providers

The Platform Provider may engage third-party service providers (such as software developers, hosting providers, and analytics services) to support the Platform. They are not parties to these Terms, hold no ownership or license in Your Data, and the Platform Provider remains responsible for ensuring they act consistently with these Terms.

11.5 Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Platform Provider shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential, special, or punitive damages arising out of or relating to these Terms or your use of the Platform. This limitation does not reduce the Platform Provider’s obligations of confidentiality or its handling of personal data, and does not override any data governance agreement applicable to the Data.

12. Account Termination

You may close your account at any time. The Platform Provider may close your account for material breach of these Terms or where required by law. Account closure does not by itself remove Your Data or the Derived Data generated from it; you may remove Your Data under Section 9, and the retention of Derived Data is governed by any applicable data governance agreement.

12.1 Individual Projects

On closure of an Individual Project Owner’s account, the User must choose to either transfer the Owner role to another User or Organization (subject to that party’s acceptance), or leave the Data in the Platform Provider’s custody under the continuing permission in Section 6. If no choice is made within 90 days, custody transfers to the Platform Provider by default. Transfer requests go to chorus@wildmon.ai.

12.2 Organization Projects

Termination of an individual User’s access to an Organization Project does not affect the Data, which remains owned and controlled by the Organization. If the Organization is dissolved, Section 12.1 applies, with the Organization or its successor making the choice.

13. General Provisions

13.1 Relationship to data governance agreements

Where an upload of Data to the Platform is subject to a separate data governance or data-sharing agreement between the Owner (or the contributing community or organization) and the Platform Provider, that agreement governs the stewardship of the Data it covers. These Terms and any such agreement are intended to operate together; where they conflict, the applicable data governance agreement prevails with respect to the Data it covers. Publication of Data beyond the Platform is handled through a separate, project-specific arrangement governed by neither document.

13.2 Confidentiality

Both parties will handle with discretion any sensitive information exchanged through the Platform that is not subject to open publication, including exact coordinates of sensitive-species locations and contributors’ personal information.

13.3 Voluntary participation

Use of the Platform is voluntary. Neither party assumes contractual, civil, or employment liability toward the other arising from the activities described in these Terms.

13.4 Age requirement

The Platform is intended for individuals aged 18 or over, or the age of majority in your jurisdiction if higher. By registering, you confirm you meet this requirement.

13.5 Amendments

The Platform Provider may update these Terms from time to time. If material revisions are made, it will post an announcement on the Platform or notify you by email, and the current version with its revision date will remain accessible on the Platform. Continued use after notice constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms. Amendments to these Terms do not amend any data governance agreement applicable to the Data, each of which has its own change process.

13.6 Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws applicable in the jurisdiction where the relevant project activities take place. Disputes that cannot be resolved amicably will be handled through the dispute-resolution mechanisms agreed by the parties; where the project operates across multiple jurisdictions, the parties will make good-faith efforts to resolve disputes through dialogue and, where necessary, mediation before initiating formal legal proceedings.

13.7 Third-party links and services

The Platform may link to or interact with third-party websites or services. Such links are provided for convenience and do not imply endorsement; the Platform Provider is not responsible for the privacy practices or content of third-party sites.

Acceptance. By completing your registration on the Platform, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agree to these Terms of Use. If registering on behalf of an organization, you confirm you are authorized to accept these Terms on its behalf.