Hydroscape-Group

1. Who we are and what these terms cover

These terms govern your use of the Hydroscape platform: the websites at hydroscape-group.co.uk, hub.hydroscape-group.co.uk and tasks.hydroscape-group.co.uk, the apps that wrap the public website (Hydroscape Monitoring Portal on Google Play, and Hydroscape for iPhone and iPad), and the tools within them, including the reporting forms, HydroVision AI, HydroReturn, HydroLicence, HydroDeter, HydroRoost, HydroLibrary, HydroTasks, MyHydroscape and the Hub.

By creating an account, submitting a record, or using any part of the platform, you accept these terms. If you don't accept them, don't use the platform.

How we handle personal data is set out separately in our Privacy Policy, which forms part of these terms.

2. Who can use the platform

You must be 16 or over to create an account. Reporting forms can be used without an account.

If you're using the platform for a club, fishery, business or other organisation, you confirm you're authorised to accept these terms on its behalf, and "you" means both you and that organisation.

3. Your account

Keep your sign-in details to yourself. You're responsible for what happens under your account unless it's the result of something we've done wrong. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has access to it.

Hub and portal access is granted to named people. Don't share a single account across a team. If someone leaves your organisation, tell us so we can remove their access.

4. Records you submit

Records you submit, sightings, counts, deterrent logs, photographs, water quality readings and biodiversity observations, become part of a shared evidence base used by fisheries, clubs, conservation bodies and regulators.

You must submit records honestly and to the best of your knowledge. Don't submit a record you know to be false or inflated, don't submit the same observation more than once to increase a count, and don't submit a photograph you didn't take or don't have permission to use.

This matters more here than on most platforms. These records are used as evidence in statutory licence applications. A knowingly false record can undermine an application that someone else is relying on, and may amount to an offence in its own right. We remove records we find to be deliberately falsified and may close the account behind them.

Licence you give us

By submitting a record you give us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive licence to store it, process it, aggregate it with other records, and publish it, including on public maps, in evidence packs, in reports and in material supplied to regulators and conservation bodies.

Publication means the individual record, not only a total. A cormorant, biodiversity or water quality record is published as filed: the position at full precision, the date, the count, the species or conditions, your notes, the photograph, and the account identifier if you were signed in when you filed it. Your name and your email address are not published. Roost and colony counts and deterrent logs are not published at all. The Privacy Policy sets this out in full.

You keep ownership of your photographs and of the records themselves. We do not sell your individual records.

This licence cannot be passed on by us to anyone else. So it does not allow us to put your records under an open licence such as CC BY or CC0, and it does not allow us to hand individual records to a biodiversity data aggregator such as the NBN Atlas or GBIF, or to the organisers of the pan-European count. We are not doing any of those things. If we decide to, we will change these terms, say so here, and tell contributors before it starts.

Deleting records

You can ask us to remove your personal identifiers from your records at any time and we'll action it. The underlying ecological data, coordinates, counts, species and dates, is retained in anonymised form as scientific data under Article 89 UK GDPR, because removing historic observations would corrupt a dataset that others rely on. This is explained further in the Privacy Policy.

5. Licence application support

This section is important and we'd ask you to read it properly.

We provide evidence. We do not provide legal advice, we are not a Natural England Registered Consultant, and we do not hold, apply for, or administer wildlife licences on anyone's behalf.

Where we support an A06 or other wildlife licence application, what we do is compile and present evidence: your sighting history, your non-lethal deterrent log, population estimates, mapping and biodiversity data. You make the application, in your own name, on Natural England's own forms and through their own process.

We can't promise an application will succeed. Licensing decisions are Natural England's alone, made against their criteria, and are outside our control. Nothing we produce should be read as an indication that a licence will be granted.

The Hydroscape A06 builder has been withdrawn. Natural England are not currently accepting applications in its format.

6. Paid subscriptions and services

Cormorant and biodiversity monitoring is free. That covers the reporting forms, a MyHydroscape account, the data, exports and reports, the public map, HydroLibrary, HydroVision AI, HydroReturn, and the support we give with a wildlife licence application including the authority to act. There is no paid tier, and nothing in that list is withheld until someone pays.

The paid parts of the platform are HydroTasks contractor listings, and any consultancy or bespoke work we agree with you separately in writing. The rest of this section applies to those only. Prices are shown before you commit, and include VAT where it applies.

Subscriptions renew automatically for the same period until cancelled. You can cancel at any time, and cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you've already paid for. We don't refund part-used periods except where the law requires it or where we've got something wrong.

We may change prices. If we do, we'll tell you at least 30 days before the change affects you, and you can cancel before it takes effect.

If you're a consumer

If you're buying as an individual rather than for a business, you have a legal right to cancel within 14 days of entering the contract, under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013.

If you ask us to start the service inside those 14 days and then cancel, you pay for what you've had up to that point. If you ask for immediate access to digital content and acknowledge that doing so ends the cancellation right, that right is lost for that content.

Nothing in these terms affects your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, including your right to services performed with reasonable care and skill and to digital content that's as described, fit for purpose and of satisfactory quality.

7. Acceptable use

Don't use the platform to break the law, to harass anyone, or to gather information about the location of protected species for the purpose of harming them or their habitat.

Don't attempt to access accounts, data or admin areas you haven't been given access to. Don't scrape, bulk-download or reverse engineer the platform, and don't use automated tools against it without our written permission.

Don't use the platform or its outputs to misrepresent what the data shows, whether to a regulator, a member, a funder or the public.

Content you submit

Photographs, recordings, notes and names you submit are published or shared as set out in section 4, so they have to be fit for that. Do not submit content that is obscene, sexual, violent, hateful, abusive, discriminatory, defamatory, or threatening, and do not submit content that is unlawful or that infringes someone else's rights.

Do not submit a photograph or a recording of an identifiable person without their agreement, and do not use the notes field for anything about a person rather than about the water or the wildlife. If a person appears incidentally in a photograph of a water, that is not a breach of this clause, but tell us and we will crop or remove the image.

We have no tolerance for this, and we do not wait for a pattern. We remove content that breaches this clause as soon as we find it or it is reported to us, and we block the account behind it. Report anything objectionable to info@hydroscape-group.co.uk and we will deal with it within one working day.

Do not harass, abuse or threaten anyone through the platform or through a record filed on it. An account used that way is closed.

8. Availability

We work to keep the platform running, but we don't guarantee uninterrupted availability. We may suspend access for maintenance, for security, or where a third-party service we depend on fails.

We may change, add to, or withdraw features. Where a change materially reduces what a paid subscription gives you, we'll tell you and you can cancel.

The A06 builder's withdrawal is an example of a feature removed because it stopped being useful. We'd rather withdraw something than leave it running and misleading.

9. Intellectual property

The platform, its software, its design, and the Hydroscape, HydroLicence, HydroDeter, HydroVision, HydroLibrary, HydroTasks and Hydro-Vericount names and marks belong to us or our licensors. Hydroscape-Group Ltd operates under a non-exclusive commercial distribution licence in respect of the underlying software.

Using the platform doesn't transfer any of that to you. You may use outputs we generate for you, evidence packs, reports, maps and exports, for your own fishery, club or organisation, including in a licence application or a funding bid. You may not resell them or present them as your own product.

These terms are the ownership position for the whole platform. Where a client portal, a dashboard or any other screen says something different about who owns records or datasets, these terms govern and section 4 is the answer: the contributor keeps ownership of their records and photographs.

10. Our liability

We don't exclude or limit our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that can't lawfully be excluded or limited.

Subject to that:

We're not liable for a licence application being refused, delayed or revoked, for a decision made by Natural England or any other regulator, or for any action you take on the strength of data or output from the platform. You decide what to submit and what to rely on.

We're not liable for the accuracy of records submitted by other users. The platform aggregates observations reported in good faith by anglers and fishery managers. It is not a surveyed dataset and shouldn't be treated as one.

If you're using the platform for business purposes, we're not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, loss of anticipated savings, or indirect or consequential loss, and our total liability to you in any 12-month period is limited to the amount you paid us in that period, or £100 if you paid us nothing.

If you're a consumer, we're liable for loss you suffer that's a foreseeable result of us breaking these terms or failing to use reasonable care and skill, and our liability is not limited below the price you paid.

11. Suspension and termination

You can stop using the platform and close your account at any time by emailing us.

We may suspend or close an account that's in serious or repeated breach of these terms, that's submitting falsified records, or where we're required to by law. Where it's practical and appropriate we'll tell you first and give you a chance to put it right.

If we close your paid account other than for breach, we'll refund the unused part of what you've paid.

12. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The version here is always the current one, with the date at the top. Where a change materially affects your rights we'll give you reasonable notice by email or in the platform before it takes effect.

13. Law and disputes

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland you may also bring proceedings in your own courts.

If you are a consumer living in the European Union, this clause does not take away the protection of the consumer law of the country you live in, and you may bring proceedings in your own country's courts where that law gives you the right to.

If something has gone wrong, email info@hydroscape-group.co.uk first. Most things are quicker to fix that way than through a formal process.