Data licensing and acceptable use
SeedPOD Terms of Use
Terms and conditions for using SeedPOD data and resources.
Overview
The Seed Portal for Online Data website (‘SeedPOD’) is operated by the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (‘RBG Kew’, 'we', 'us' or 'our'). We are a non-departmental public body with exempt charitable status, whose principal place of business is at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond, TW9 3AE.
RBG Kew and the SeedPOD team are committed to responsible data management and data sharing practices.
When you access the SeedPOD website you agree to the SeedPOD terms on this page, which hereby incorporate the RBG Kew data and digital Terms of Use (opens in a new tab) that apply to all websites we own (together the ‘SeedPOD Terms of Use’). If there are any inconsistencies between the RBG Kew Terms of Use and SeedPOD terms on this page, the SeedPOD terms shall apply.
If you don’t agree to the SeedPOD Terms of Use, then please do not use our website.
Changes to the SeedPOD Terms of Use
The SeedPOD Terms of Use may be amended at any time. You should check this page and the RBG Kew Terms of Use regularly to see if anything has changed, as it will apply to your use of the SeedPOD website.
Intellectual Property and data use conditions
The SeedPOD database includes datasets contributed by a number of collaborators and licensed to RBG Kew for the purposes of making their data available via the SeedPOD website, subject to the SeedPOD Terms of Use.
Kew is the owner of all intellectual property rights in the SeedPOD website and its content including the database as a whole, except that data contributors retain ownership of intellectual property in the subsets of data they have each provided. The SeedPOD website and its content are protected by intellectual property laws and treaties around the world. All such rights are reserved.
The data and information contained in SeedPOD are made publicly available for non-commercial purposes only. You must not use any part of the content on our site for commercial purposes without obtaining a licence to do so from us or our licensors. It is our intention to make seed collection information resources freely available primarily for seed conservation, restoration and research communities. You may make copies, including electronic copies, of the data held within this database and share such copies with third parties, provided you ensure third parties are made aware of and comply with the SeedPOD Terms of Use.
No data mining or web scraping
Following a search, summary details can be downloaded directly from this website for up to 5000 records. If you wish to download a larger dataset or make use of the data for purposes outside the scope of these Terms of Use (such as for any commercial purposes), then please contact the SeedPOD team at SeedPOD@kew.org.
You shall not conduct, facilitate, authorise or permit any text or data mining or web scraping in relation to our site for any purpose, including the development, training, fine-tuning or validation of AI systems or models.
The provisions in this clause should be treated as an express reservation of our rights in this regard, including for the purposes of Article 4(3) of the Digital Copyright Directive ((EU) 2019/790).
You shall not use, and we do not consent to the use of, our site, or any data published by, or contained in, or accessible via, our site for the purposes of developing, training, fine-tuning or validating any AI system or model or for any other purposes not explicitly set out in the SeedPOD Terms of Use.
This clause will not apply insofar as (but only to the extent that) we are unable to exclude or limit text or data mining or web scraping activity by contract under the laws which are applicable to us.
Citation
If you use SeedPOD Data in published works, you must use as a minimum the attribution: “SeedPOD (2026), facilitated by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in collaboration with third party data contributors. Published on the Internet; [insert web address] on [insert date]”. Where raw data is sourced from a low number of data partners, typically 3 or less, data partners should also be cited. Where data is aggregated from many users, data partner names must be available on request to the publication author(s).
Privacy and visitor data
The SeedPOD team does not collect or store any personal data about visitors to this website. There are no accounts and no sign-in, nothing you type into the search is recorded, and we operate no tracking or analytics of any kind. You can browse the site and search the database without identifying yourself.
Kew's own cookie and website-analytics tooling will be added to this site by Kew's Digital Experience team before public launch. Anything it records is collected and held by the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew under Kew's privacy policy (opens in a new tab) and cookie policy (opens in a new tab). The SeedPOD team has no access to it.
The language switcher in the corner of the page is an optional third-party service provided by Google Translate. It contacts Google only if you use it: choosing a language sends the page content to Google for translation, and Google's own terms and privacy policy then apply. Leaving the site in English does not contact Google at all.
If you contact us by email, we use your message to reply to you and, where relevant, to record a data or takedown request. It is not added to the database.
Takedown procedure
Details of our takedown procedure can be found in the RBG Kew Terms of Use. For any takedown requests or queries relating to the SeedPOD website, please contact the SeedPOD team at seedpod@kew.org.