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The Biodiversity Centre for Wildlife Studies is a registered non-profit Society in British Columbia. Your membership and donations are greatly appreciated, and support a number of our activities, including the publication of Wildlife Afield. However, operating the Wildlife Data Centre is a costly endeavor that entails numerous expenses that are difficult to retrieve. For example, the Wildlife Data Centre processes anywhere from 350,000 to over 1,000,000 wildlife records every year. These observations need to be entered into our databases, verified, catalogued, and archived.

Retrieving information or data also takes time. For every request we receive, new queries need to be developed in order to extract the exact information required. This can range from simple species lists that may take only a few hours, to complex queries requiring data manipulation, calculations, mapping, and statisitical analysis requiring several weeks to complete.

In as many cases as possible, we try to recruit volunteers living in Victoria to work at the Centre to help reduce costs. However, with the volumes of data that we process, the storage space required to house the information (computer and physical shelving), and the time and resources required to process requests, it is necessary to charge a fee for some services.