India Nature Watch

India Nature Watch, usually referred to as INW, is a non-commercial community website that focuses on sharing photographs of Indian wildlife.[1] The site was started in 2005 by Sudhir Shivaram, Kalyan Varma, Yathin S K and Vijay Cavale.[2]

INW allows uploads into eight categories: Birds, Mammals, Reptiles & Amphibians, Butterflies & Moths, Landscape, Insects & Other Invertebrate, Flora and Others[3] and currently hosts close to 400,000 photographs of Indian wildlife. The copyright of images hosted on the site remains with the photographer, although the site does encourage photographers to release photographs under more liberal licenses like Creative Commons.[4]

The site was started by the moderators of a popular mailing list called india-nature-pixs when Yahoo stopped storing of attachments on its groups service. The aim of the site is to help document and share India's rich but threatened wildlife through the means of photography, with the help of a community of wildlife photographers in India. Photographs posted on the site have uncovered new ranges for species and documentation of rare wildlife,[5][6] though the website has come under fire for being emblematic of an Indian wildlife photography culture that has failed to support conservation efforts in any meaningful way.[7]

INW also maintains a strong neutral and non-conflict culture and discourages posting of controversial photographs. It is believed to be the most popular site in India for wildlife photographs.[7]

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This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 4/10/2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.