Sensor.Community — licence & access

Sensor.Community is public and keyless — there are no credentials, no API key, and no login. Both the live JSON API (data.sensor.community) and the archive (archive.sensor.community) are served anonymously over HTTPS, and the backend uses only requests + pandas (core earthlens dependencies), so there is no extra to install.

Licence — ODbL

Sensor.Community data is licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL): you may use, share, and adapt it, but you must attribute the source and keep derived databases under a share-alike licence. The backend emits a LicenseWarning on every download() so the obligation rides along with the data rather than being discovered silently:

import warnings
from earthlens.sensor_community import LicenseWarning

with warnings.catch_warnings():
    warnings.simplefilter("ignore", LicenseWarning)   # if you have acknowledged it
    df = EarthLens(data_source="sensor-community", ...).download()

Data-quality caveat

The readings come from low-cost, citizen-operated sensors. They are excellent for dense spatial coverage and relative trends but are not reference-grade — do not treat them as regulatory measurements. For reference-grade observations use earthlens.airnow, earthlens.eea_aq, or earthlens.openaq.

The gated live e2e test (tests/sensor_community/test_sensor_community_e2e.py) is marked sensor_community and fetches one recent day over a tight, sensor-dense bbox.