So I’ve used iNaturalist for about a year now. I’ve been making lots of observations (mostly fungi), and didn’t realize that default location accuracy was “open”. I know I can edit observation accuracy in the app (I use Android), but when I went to modify location accuracy on the website, I couldn’t find a place where it was changeable.
So, two questions:
Is it possible to change location accuracy on the iNaturalist website? If not, why not?
Is it possible to mass change a big group of observations’ location accuracy? I want to change almost all my observations to “obscured”, but if the only way to do this is to edit them one at a time in the Android app, that would be a ton of work. This would be a good feature, if it doesn’t exist.
From your post you’re talking about status of location, accuracy is how precise the location is, I don’t see such option on batch edit, so likely you’ll need to do it one by one, but you have only a few observations, so it won’t take long, setting is in Edit under map.
Why would you want to do that though?
I want to do it because of the recent extreme interest in edible mushrooms, i want to protect specific spots from being revealed, while being useful in a general way. :-)
I would like to do this. I have logged the default lisiting for birds on boat landings which have INaturalist circular broader areas including parts of the parking lots but the project I want them to be part of only includes borders in the lake protection zone not the entire INaturalist landing site. My sightings are actually in the narrower defined lake protection zone but they do not appear in there unless I create new listings. I have hundreds I will need to go back and resubmit with pinpoint borders because of the way INaturalist is set up and the lake project not wanting any additional areas added. I will then need to remove original postings with the IDs to get around this flaw. So you see there may be reasons people want this.
I think you write about different problem, you’re allowed to change pin location and accuracy when you’re uploading and when editing, you don’t need to resubmit it. And you can do that in batch edit. This post isn’t about accuracy though, it’s about obscuring location, it just has a little bit misleading title.
Sorry about that - obscuring location makes it less accurate, so it seemed like “location accuracy” was appropriate. Sorry if that confused anyone. :-)
Here’s how to change the location accuracy for a lot of observations at the same time:
— On the website, under your personal icon in the upper right, use the drop down menu to select “Edit Observations”.
— To change the accuracy on more than one observation at a time, choose the “Batch Edit” button at the top of the list, then click the selection buttons for those observations you want to change. (Note: IF you are just changing the accuracy of several observations to the same distance (e.g., to zero meters), and not the locations, they don’t have to all be at the same location.)
— After selecting the set of observations, click “Edit Selected”. A new screen appears with all of the selected observations stacked in a list. Here you can individually change any details of each observations or change the same field for all of them in one action.
— To change the same field for all observations in one action, select “Batch Operations” at the top of the list. The expanded editing window has blank fields for changing the identification, date, and location. To change the accuracy for the whole set of selected observations, click on “edit” under the empty location field. Type in the desired value (e.g., “0”) in the “Acc (m)” field. Then click the “Apply” button directly below that to change that value for all observations.
— When you are comfortable that you’ve made all the desired changes to the set of observations, be sure and scroll down to the bottom of the entire list and click “Save All”.
No worries Tim, that can definitely be confusing. iNaturalist refers to machine-obscuration of locations as “geoprivacy.” I took the liberty of editing your topic title to reflect that. Hope that works for you.
In the iNaturalist context, “accuracy” refers to the uncertainty radius around non-obscured locations, displayed as a circle around the map pin, and entered as a distance in meters.