The following Terms of Use define the policies of The Community Science Institute regarding use of the CSI Database. This policy communicates our data license, intellectual property and acknowledgement, bulk downloads, and access policy for automated crawlers and bots.

1. Data License

All data from the CSI Water Quality Database site is in the public domain, CC-BY.
The uses below are strongly encouraged.

2. Copyright

The CSI Database and its contents are copyright The Community Science Institute (c) 2007-2025

3. Acknowledgements

Acknowledgement is required if you make use of our data.
Paper citations may use the following format:
2025. The Community Science Institute. Public Water Quality Database for New York State. Retrieved on {date} from https://database.communityscience.org
We kindly request that public conferences or presentations acknowledge the staff and volunteers that contributed to making this data available.

4. Bulk Download

Bulk download of our data is encouraged by real humans. We support citizen science and encourage the use of our data by the general public, academics and researchers. We provide a download pages where you can retrieve all or part of our data in CSV/Excel format here for each data set. If you make use of our data, we would love to hear from you.

5. Automated Retrieval, Crawlers & Bots

We have found that crawlers and bots, even when well behaved, can still collectively cause serious performance degradations on servers intended for real human use. Therefore, we discourage and actively defend against crawlers. For AI uses see the next section on Data Reuse. For a more information see:
2025. Hoetzlein, R. Protecting Small Organizations from AI Bots with Logrip: Hierarchical IP Hashing, Quanta Sciences

6. Data Reuse

Data from the CSI Water Quality Databases may be republished in any form and for any use, including commercial purposes. We encourage use in academic research. We also allow organizations and companies to train AI models using our data, but prefer there is a human-in-the-loop making use of our bulk download, and appreciate if you inform us of your use case with examples.

The Community Science Institute (c) 2007-2025 Terms of Use