Deferred providers

Some data sources were evaluated and deliberately not integrated into earthlens. They are listed here so the project surface stays honest: these are known and considered, not overlooked. The usual reasons are a licence trap (non-commercial / restricted redistribution), no stable programmatic access (no API or no maintained Python client), or commercial-only access.

If you need one of these datasets, follow the manual route in its row. Always confirm the current licence and terms on the provider's own site before use — terms change, and the notes below reflect the state at evaluation time, not a legal guarantee.

Summary

Provider	Domain	Why deferred	How to get the data
GVP (Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program)	Volcanoes / eruptions	Reference database, no stable bulk API / maintained Python client; reuse is attribution-bound	Browse or export from the Volcanoes of the World site; a WFS/GeoServer endpoint exists for one-off pulls
GRDC (Global Runoff Data Centre)	River discharge (in-situ)	Raw portal has no API (web map + form → email delivery) and prohibits redistribution, so the full database stays deferred. But GRDC's openly-licensed subset ships as GRDC-Caravan (CC-BY-4.0, redistributable)	Open route (recommended): earthlens.caravan with dataset="grdc" (or the grdc-caravan facade key) fetches it from Zenodo — DOI 10.5281/zenodo.15349031 (v0.6, 5,356 catchments, 1950–2023). The remaining restricted stations are only available manually via the GRDC portal
IBAT (Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool)	Protected areas / KBA / Red List	Commercial / subscription for most access tiers; free tier is limited and NC	Use an IBAT subscription; for the underlying open layers use earthlens.wdpa (Protected Planet) and earthlens.iucn instead
Map of Life (MoL)	Species range maps	Per-dataset licensing; many layers are NC / research-only	Use the Map of Life portal / its API under the specific dataset's terms; for open occurrences use earthlens.gbif / earthlens.obis
IQAir (AirVisual)	Air quality (ground)	Commercial API with paid tiers; free tier heavily rate-limited; redistribution restricted	Use the paid IQAir/AirVisual API; for open AQ use earthlens.openaq
Renewables.ninja	Solar / wind power time series	CC-BY-NC (non-commercial) + rate-limited; academic use	Register at renewables.ninja and pull per-site series under the NC licence; for open solar/wind resource use earthlens.pvgis / earthlens.nrel / earthlens.solar_wind_atlas

Notes

• NC (non-commercial) sources — MoL (many layers), Renewables.ninja, and IBAT's free tier — are excluded from the default integration path because earthlens makes no assumption about a user's commercial status. Where an open-licensed alternative covers the same need, it is named in the table (e.g. WDPA/IUCN for protected areas, GBIF/OBIS for occurrences, OpenAQ for air quality, PVGIS/NREL for renewables).
• Restricted-access sources — the raw GRDC portal has no API (form → email delivery) and prohibits redistribution, so the full database cannot be wrapped behind an anonymous download(). However, GRDC's openly-licensed stations are published as the GRDC-Caravan extension (CC-BY-4.0), which is fetchable and redistributable from Zenodo — that is what earthlens.caravan wraps, and it is the recommended route for open GRDC discharge. Only the restricted stations remain portal-only. Note GRDC-Caravan is a versioned historical archive, not a live feed; for current discharge use earthlens.usgs_water (US near-real-time) or GloFAS via earthlens.ecmwf.
• No-stable-client sources — GVP — could be revisited if a maintained API/Python client and clear bulk-reuse terms appear.
• GFM (Copernicus Global Flood Monitoring) — no longer deferred. GFM is served anonymously by EODC's public STAC API (stac.eodc.eu) as the collection GFM, so it ships on the existing stac backend under the eodc endpoint (eodc/gfm) — no account and no openEO entitlement needed. See STAC → Copernicus GFM. (The earlier read that GFM was reachable only via the registered-account api.gfm.eodc.eu was superseded once the public STAC route was confirmed.)

These deferrals are tracked as L15 in the low-tier roadmap. Re-evaluate a row if its licence or access model changes.