I do not bother to identify anything with a private location. If you are not willing to share information with others, why should others share information with you? They have no scientific value anyway. But “obscured” is fine. That’s close enough to be useful.
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How do you find the terminology page you linked to? And do those terms, particularly coordinates_obscured, appear in the GBIF export?
Interesting to note that the issue you linked to was motivated by the same problem:
It’s generally good data management to include metadata with exports, especially when the fields can be confusing. For example, if you use the export tool to download observations with mixed open and obscured geoprivacy, it’s not obvious that some of the lat/longs are true coordinates and some of them are obscured coordinates.
This is now fixed in the native iNaturalist export. Now that I know there’s an informationWithheld field I can check my GBIF exports.
The issue is, GBIF data are increasingly heterogeneous. iNaturalist uncertainty values are mostly used consistently. But in other cases, it’s not clear if the uncertainty comes from the original field data, from some subsequent geolocation process, or, in some cases, if it’s auto-generated independent of the geolocation. I’ve seen enough cases where the values are nonsensical to be convinced that a blanket filter on a large (1000s+) set of records is problematic.
This is bigger than iNaturalist, that’s true. When I started using GBIF it was only used for herbarium records. At some point they started adding survey data, which meant the data now included ‘absences’ as well as ‘presences’. Which is another issue that’s obvious when you’re aware of it, but very unsettling if you weren’t.
At my end, this means building up a suite of filters to apply to different datasets. And on that front, it’s important to note that the only way to do that consistently at the GBIF side is to know to search on the value
datasetKey == “50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425ef4a7”
since there’s no other consistent identifier of the ‘official’ iNaturalist export, i.e.:
https://discourse.gbif.org/t/how-is-inaturalist-data-identified/4240
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Wow I thought someone would post a quick yes or no and that’d be it lol. Thanks for all the responses. I don’t think I’ve ever felt the need to make an observation private, but I do post a lot of obscured observations, so I guess I will have to put some more thought into it in the future. I’ll try to join some more projects that are used for research and share locality data there.