Anyone else have concerns about protected species not actually being protected when obscured?
If we’ve been visiting a location and have one protected species obscured but not all the neighboring species a poacher can easily pinpoint the location of the obscured species. I was discussing this with a local herpetologist yesterday and this is something they and several other state employees have been concerned about.
How should iNat handle this? Should they obscure the time and date of the observance too? Or protect the species in some other way?
if you’re really that concerned about someone else discovering the location of a particular observation, you shouldn’t post it at all.
the obscuration feature in iNat doesn’t fully protect the location. it’s possible for any random person to get the underlying observation of any observation obscured in the system, and it doesn’t require any interpolation based on other observations.
Could you clarify a bit further? How can they get access to that information?
Also, I would hope that iNat would make further efforts to protect those protected species. I may be aware of the possible issues, but not every observer will be and will post thinking they’ve done their due diligence.
iNat already does this (see the Help article for more). You may be interested to read the many other threads on the forum about the pros and cons, and the limitations, of obscuring locations of threatened species.
in that same section, it talks about other potential problems. the thing that i’m talking about is not described here, probably because describing it would tell people how to do it, which nobody wants. i won’t clarify for the same reason. all you need to know is that the problem exists, it’s not obvious, it affects any obscured observation, and the best thing to protect an observation that needs 100% location protection is to not post the observation at all.
Yes, I will not but, again, not all individual observers will recognize the potential issues so the onus should be on iNaturalist to either make the observer aware of the potential issues with posting or protect the location and time of the observation (thankfully it’s sounding like they do protect the time and date, per other folks on here).