Ducks Unlimited vs Nominatim

Ducks Unlimited publishes a public ArcGIS Feature Service listing its university and collegiate conservation chapters as geocoded point locations across the US and Canada. It's read-only and needs no API key — queryable with the standard Esri REST query syntax (WHERE clauses, field selection, spatial filters) and exportable as JSON, GeoJSON, CSV, KML, and several other GIS formats. The dataset is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0, so results can be reused non-commercially with attribution.

Nominatim provides worldwide forward and reverse geocoding built entirely on OpenStreetMap data, needing no API key — only a descriptive User-Agent or Referer header identifying the calling application. The public instance at nominatim.openstreetmap.org is a free courtesy service, not a commercial product: its usage policy caps requests at 1 per second, forbids autocomplete-style querying and bulk/parallel scripts, and requires caching results rather than re-fetching them. Heavier users are expected to self-host Nominatim against their own OSM extract instead of relying on the shared instance.