For plants: If the accuracy is > 500 meters, even better >100 meters remove Research Grade. In other words if the plants is impossible to check in the field it should not get a Research Grade. We often follow up plants to be sure of the ID and > 100 is almost impossible for a tiny plant. Now I ha…

Are you saying you set “location inaccurate” for large accuracy circles?

Not much a plant guy but this sounds quite logical. I agree. My phones gps is usually accurate to 50 to a 100 ft.

[image] efmer: Now I have to manually set location inaccurate e.g. 13 km off, this could be done automatically. I’m not sure it is appropriate to be clicking that a location is inaccurate because of an arbitrary distance buffer that you have chosen has been entered. I don’t think that is the …

we used to do this,but we stopped. There was a long discussion about it. my opinion is they should not be research grade or at least not on any range maps since that data is very problematic and deceptive at least in the case of plants. I guess the idea was because a few animals like albatrosses mig…

I wholly agree for plants, but for animals I would like to think the research grade should be kept since they can move around. I have some very large accuracy bubbles in Kenya (5000-7000m) because I took all pictures without a GPS and had to “guess” where they were in a general area (I genuinely got…

[image] charlie: ponderosa pines showing up in the middle of Lake Tahoe This is inaccurate if the uncertainty buffer is 5m or 50000m. It’s not related to the size of the buffer. What’s to stop me from applying a personal standard of 5 meters, for flagging things as wrong. And what do you do …

the buffer was touching the edge of the lake on both sides because it was huge. There are ponderosas on the lake shore so technically that wasnt inaccurate. [image] cmcheatle: What’s to stop me from applying a personal standard of 5 meters, for flagging things as wrong make it 10 and i’m fin…

Before starting the discussion again, I’d like to refer to what has been said before regarding this topic on the Google group: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/inaturalist/-JR7FgQWALQ/49ymGRk7AgAJ I still think that accuracy should not be used to automatically exclude observations from becoming RG. …

On the one hand it could be logical to exclude from research grade observations that feature an “imprecise” position, while, on the other hand, for some protected and/or endangered species it is preferable to provide an imprecise position or even an obscured one. This criterion could apply also to o…

Don't let an observation attain Research Grade if its location is very imprecise

Feature Requests

tiwane April 12, 2019, 2:04am 4

Edited the topic title to make it more explicit. I will say this was a conversation in the Google Group many years ago.

Topic		Replies	Views
On observations with unusually low location accuracy General question	89	2215	June 8, 2025
Huge "Accuracy" Circles General	43	1293	January 24, 2026
Having an accuracy radius on your location can be important to some data users General	103	3296	December 5, 2024
Deliberately posting false or inaccurate information General	64	4868	July 9, 2023
How accurate should be date and location for research grade? General question	28	1239	April 27, 2021

Don't let an observation attain Research Grade if its location is very imprecise

Related topics