A common theme in iNaturalist is that people like to include observations that are different or unusual. A plant in an odd place, a bird somewhere it’s not usually seen, an insect that hitched a ride in a car, or a first record of an organism in a particular county/state/providence/country are all noteworthy and exciting.
Unfortunately, another common theme is that many observations aren’t plotted where they were actually seen. Faulty GPS, not zooming in far enough, lumping an entire trip to another country in one location or just plain accidents all result in observations being plotted in the wrong habitat, location or even country.
To someone looking at your observation, it’s impossible to tell the difference between the first scenario and the second, unless there are some comments to go along with the observation. So this is a plea to observers to include some notes when they know that something is rare or unusual in the area they observed it in.
Having gone through a whole lot of iNaturalist observations in preparation for a trip recently, it;s obvious that popular tourist areas have lots of incorrectly plotted observations. Sea creatures plotted inside a hotel 100 miles from the ocean are easy to figure out as incorrect, but others are harder, like the only report of a mountain dwelling species on the coast. Was it actually seen there, or just plotted there because the person plotted all their observations from a 7 day tour in the same spot? The world may never know, because that person hasn’t used iNaturlist in 7 years… So for the sake of everyone that comes after you, make a note if you see something odd, to distinguish it from a mistaken location.
That would be, indeed, best practice. But sometimes, the observer is unaware that it is a special sighting or that the GPS is off, and mistakes during uploading are common.
I have found many similar cases to what you describe. I leave a comment asking for clarification and, in the meantime, mark “Location is accurate” as no. I only do this if I am really sure this is either not possible or an extraordinary sighting.
Here I go by the rule, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof!”
Many of these observations are research-grade and hard to catch, so it is good to react to improve data quality overall.
Some, but not all. For example, I did some height record verifications of mammals on Kilimandjaro (for this paper “New High Elevation Records for the Mesic Four-Striped Grass Rat Rhabdomys dilectus on Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania” https://doi.org/10.2982/028.113.0201)
I found several observations on Kilimandjaro of animals pictured in the forest, with the circle of precision well within the alpine desert zone. Not possible! The geomodel does not currently pick up on this (although a future model could have elevation as well or be more sensitive to the local range).
It also battles with our Cape Peninsula endemics. It is another tool to use, a way to find problems - but then up to us to decide if this obs is an anomaly, or not. Interesting discussion in the comments on the blog post.
Another reason to do this is because people will helpfully misidentify your out-of-range observations if you don’t head them off.
This is why the first Yellow-crowned Night-Heron I ever saw (and the first rare bird I chased, so I’m extremely confident in the ID) is currently stuck at “Typical Herons and Egrets”.
I’m not sure what you mean. There aren’t any other iNaturalist observations of that particular bird (not a lot of iNaturalist coverage in the area), but I did add a link to my (confirmed) eBird checklist. It just takes a while to get the disagreeing IDs cancelled out. (…it did finally make it back to research grade, though.)
(…it did finally