to help confirm duplicates generated by different observers
to help determine if the location is plausible. For example, the observer has submitted observations with locations separated by a large distance but the date/time are within a few minutes of each other (ie. impossible to have traversed the distance in the allotted time).
I find it remarkable how many people clearly have completely bogus times set in their cameras (or the time is somehow being corrupted in the submission process). I see photos of the exact same organism, in the exact same pose, on the exact same plant, with the only difference being a slightly different viewing angle/magnification. Clearly two or more observers are photographing the same organism at approximately the same time. But the timestamps on the photos are radically different (and sometimes the observations have quite different location coordinates). It’s understandable when it comes from casual iNat users. But I find it depressing how often the culprits are regular/familiar contributors who generally give the impression of being at least semi-serious about what they’re doing.
And yeah, I’m generally lucky to get an accurate date. Same goes for location. Despite multiple layers of auditing, bogus observations still get past me.
A great many of us don’t know how to set the camera date and time. I certainly don’t – I had the guy at the camera store do it for me. And for many people, including some who use iNaturalist, date isn’t important, isn’t even a question. They just want an ID.
By the way, observations of the same individual organisms taken by different observers at the same time don’t meet iNaturalist’s definition of duplicates. They can be annoying though – I once ran into posts of a school field trip that including 20 or so photos of the same individual Monterrey Cypress taking from the same point in the trail, one per student. Sigh. At least if you figure one of them out the others go by pretty fast.
Yes, I know, but they meet my definition. You keep emphasizing that the responsibility is on data users to screen their data according to their own criteria. This is exactly what I’m doing. Part of my screening process is screening out what I regard as duplication (along with other junk observations).
In this case the 31km radius makes the circle of uncertainty larger than the obscuration rectangle for the observation, which results in the map preview showing the area including the observation as more precise than it really should. But in the context of this discussion that’s still a pretty small uncertainty radius.
When I had added my id at that time the centre was in Java and the circle was spanning the entire Indonesia - even the location was “Indonesia”. Later the observer updated it and now we have an obscuration rectangle.
have you heard of “internet safety” and “privacy”? they are two of the most common reasons people have for obscuring their observations or increasing the accuracy radius.
personally, i think inat should have better obscuring tools that are more customizable. these days the jitter puts most of my observations in the ocean. in some cases i want date or location obscured, but not necessarily both. the way it works right now means that i have to generalize and obscure both.
Sometimes I might want to reveal a truer location of a sensitive colony to a subset of local (and trusted) inat users helping care for that colony. While at the same time… allowing broad oversight of identity via “verifiable”.
I fully agree with that, and I do not understand how observations with 20000 km-s accuracy still are marked as research grade. It is an annoying mistake.