Not if they sell it fast.
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My camera has an automatic GPS function so I just use where I was standing - I figure if I could see it from that spot, it’s good enough!
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I think your location is important, and especially if it is wrong and not labelled as such.
I’m trying to find the effect of elevation above sea level, and geological formations, on several species in steep hills.
Half a kilometer that purports to be valid (isn’t labelled as obscured) makes the difference between valid and false data.
Like, today I recorded species A and not B for 5km, then B and not A for 400m, then A and not B for 50m, then B not A for 7km, along a particular subset of rock type.
I record my track on a phone GPS, then use gpsPrune or similar to correlate my photos and write exif data to them. Fiddly to learn, but soon becomes quick & automatic, 3 minutes all up, and with the added benefit of photo thumbnails in a kml on Google Earth, makes cataloging & retrieval easier.
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I think this only satisfies the DQA if you’re using an inaccuracy circle that encompasses the location of the plant. Otherwise it should be marked casual as location is not accurate, no?
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That sounds like a job for a spreadsheet or data sheet more so than iNaturalist observations.
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Sometimes you want an observation to appear on a local project, but obscuring it makes it appear on another municipality or even country if the observation is close to the border, so I know some people that change the location a bit instead of obscuring it.
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That’s the price we pay to get the next generation of naturalists ready. And malicious users won’t return after their assignment.
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This happens and I hope I usually pick it up and a
amended it. There are however two notes I’d like to make: I am told obscuring does not work in SA. In fact I have also been aggressively reminded by professionals from on one of my rarest finds that I am not allowed to obscure. I ended up adjusting the gps accuracy to 50km because the owner of the land asked me to and because clearly there is a danger of poaching and/or extinction. The other issue is that gps is owned by US military and it changes, slightly, but it does. Some of my obs close to the sea are now suddenly in the sea. Some of my obs. gps copied down on a specimen sheet for it to go into a herbarium are now of a different gps on iNat than when entered originally.
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Sensitive species (by SA law) are automatically obscured. It work very well in SA where there are millions of plants being moved illegally. The second point is that most newer GPS models now can work from the European and Russian and several other systems in addition to the US system. There should never be any surprises. Probably the best thing is to do is double check not to mix up degree minutes and seconds (DMS) with decimal degrees (DD) from the GPS to the herbarium sheet to iNat.
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This can also depend on the accuracy of the coastline on the basemap you are viewing against.
If it has been auto-obscured by iNat the location is random within the square. One of the bulbs planted in my garden is swimming out in the middle of False Bay.
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This is kind of the way my observations are. Sometimes I will go on a trip and not upload until I get home, and my camera doesn’t have location the way it does time. So if it’s a place I’m not sure about, the circle will be wider and less specific. Simply because I DON’T know exactly where the organism was. Especially considering many of my trips are day hikes, my PR covering 21 miles.
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My phone does this!! My camera does not. If I’m out and use my phone for an organism I wasn’t expecting to run into, it will always be perfectly location specific. But my camera doesn’t have this, so those observations will be a little broader.
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Here’s the method I use to get accurate location data for my photos while in the field:
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It is important that the location is for the bird. Once you upload it on iNat, you can edit it and move the point 100-200 metres etc. and then add the uncertainty from that point.
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If you want to geotag rare/protected plants with the appropriate 100m or 1km grid (to keep data scientifically sound - not locating orchids in the ocean or the wrong mountain range), you can’t: for some undisclosed reason, iNat only allows either 0.2° inaccuracy (a ~20km grid at my latitude, a hundred times too coarse for many uses), or exact pinpointing (+/- a metric GPS imprecision around it, sending dozens of well-meaning enthusiasts trampling the area). No choice.
Due to such shortcomings, you have to degrade the coordinates (i.e. alter numbers in EXIF data prior to disseminating files), making them false by a certain amount (e.g. rounded to the nearest arc-minute) - if only to comply with official policies of your employer. Calling it “fraud” sounds a bit harsh.
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Just to be clear, the iNat 0.2° obscuration system does not degrade the true coordinates at all (if those were originally supplied). All it does is mask them from public display. The true coordinates are still there, and you always have the option to share them with individual users or project curators whom you trust, and with outside researchers as you see fit.
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I’d be interested to see some examples (if you want to share them privately that would be fine). All obscured observations publicly show and are indexed in the correct standard place the true coordinates appear in (eg county, state, and country level places).
What is likely happening in situations you describe is that iNat’s standard place boundaries are simplified, so in places where the boundary is complex the observation might be put in the wrong place. For example, here’s an approximation of iNat’s boundary for Vietnam (in orange), with part of Cambodia:
You’ll see it doesn’t match the border that Google Maps uses.
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Oh yes, I know how it works. :) However, it is the 0.2°-degraded coordinates that are also exported to e.g. GBIF, whereby it remains obscured, thus of rather limited use.
What would be great:
- precise coordinates imported to iNat
- precise coordinates optionally obscured on iNat like now, displayed as degraded to ~20km/0.2° (yay, no poaching!), and like now optionally revealed with original precision to trusted iNat friends.
- precise coordinates exported from iNat towards other databases, but optionally altered to some user-selectable accuracy (0.01° or 100m or 1km or 10° or whatever I deem ethical and sensible) thus maximizing further scientific use
Unfortunately, what “choice” we have at the moment:
- precise coordinates imported to iNat
- precise coordinates displayed on iNat (poaching!)
- precise coordinates exported to e.g. GBIF (poaching! biogeographic studies!)
or - precise coordinates imported to iNat
- obscured coordinates displayed for most users on iNat (yay, no poaching!), except trusted friends
- obscured coordinates exported to e.g. GBIF (yay, no poaching! but mostly useless for science)
or - manually-altered coordinates imported to iNat (boo, tampering, “fraud”!)
- manually-altered coordinates displayed (or obscured) on iNat (yay, no poaching! but remains altered for my trusted iNat friends too…)
- manually-altered coordinates exported to e.g. GBIF (yay, no poaching! usable for biogeographic studies!)
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Just noting here out of interest that for Australian observations, both the true coordinates and the masked coordinates get exported to the Atlas of Living Australia, the Australian ‘version’ of GBIF. The masked coordinates are what is shown on the map in public view, and the true coordinates are privately stored and accessible upon request for eg research.
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