COVER-Fish Commons Scale-Out Layer

The COVER-Fish Commons Scale-Out Layer is a versioned Wikimedia Commons reference collection for fine-grained fish recognition. It contains 26,586 FishBase 25.04-aligned records across 3,924 taxa: 26,454 byte-bearing records and 132 pointer-only records. Every row retains source provenance, attribution, recorded licence, content identity and taxonomy mapping. The collection was used as a large source-layer intervention in COVER-Fish to study how reference-gallery updates interact with aggregation rules and query domains. The frozen photo-suitability gate assessed reference value, not species identity. Image bytes are distributed through three independently extractable archives grouped by principal reuse obligation: public domain/CC0, CC BY, and CC BY-SA. A published row-level crosswalk and equivalence receipt verify that all 26,454 image byte sequences match the canonical S4 row set. Users can download only the tier needed for an intended use. Row-level terms and attribution remain authoritative; pointer-only records do not redistribute source pixels.