Ducks Unlimited vs OpenStreetMap

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.

The core OpenStreetMap API serves and edits the raw map database underlying OSM — nodes, ways, and relations — over HTTPS at api.openstreetmap.org. Reading map data requires no authentication at all, while creating or modifying data requires an OAuth 2.0 token tied to an OSM account (the older Basic Auth/OAuth 1.0a login methods were retired in June 2024). It's a general-purpose data API rather than a geocoding service specifically — OSM points address-lookup users to the separate Nominatim service, and bulk-read users to Overpass.