Best Way to Access Standard Place Data for Obscured Observations

General
1

I’m working a project gathering county level location data for tiger beetles in the eastern US. Some tiger beetle species have taxon geoprivacy in various states. Since obscured observations are indexed to standard places (which US counties are), it should be possible to get the info I am looking for.

Currently, the method I am using to get this data is to use the iNat export page with appropriate taxa/filters and selecting to include the “place_county_name” field. Is this a reliable way to get my desired data and/or is their a better/different workflow I should consider?

2

I don’t know about exporting, but I have a question to add. If a beetle has geoprivacy in Mississippi but not Alabama, and it’s in Mississippi and close enough that the rectangle (or even the circle set by the observer) extends into Alabama, and the observer has not set it to diffuse but it’s diffuse only because of Mississippi conservation status, can it be exported as in Mississippi even if the random point in the rectangle is in Alabama? (Mississippi and Alabama could be any two adjacent states.)

3

Observations with obscuration will show in exports for standard places (states in the US are standard places) regardless of where the bounding box is (though other factors can affect whether observations occur in searches such as their accuracy circles).

My question is focused on the ability to access the standard place “membership” data itself, not whether the observation can be filtered for by the standard place in which it occurs. I could theoretically do individual downloads for counties, to get this info, but that would be very inefficient.

4

I just checked a bunch of obs that have the randomized point fall outside of the county border they truly occur in (some mine, some others). The place_admin2_name column in the export matched the county listed on the observation page under “Encompassing Places” in each case.

1 Like
5

Thanks! I hadn’t ever used those fields, but this makes sense. I compared the place_admin2_name and place_county_name fields for a test export, and they are the same (except for one county that is misspelled in place_county_name with an extra space as opposed to the correct spelling in place_admin2_name for some reason). So it seems like this approach works at least!