Let’s not rove into wild speculation about other people’s priorities. That isn’t correct anyway.
While precise location may be important to you, a number of people who may use the data might not care. For instance, in insects, a lot of time specimens are labelled only to the nearest city or even county, but no one raises much of a fuss there. We sure live in an age where there is no excuse not to get an exact location within 100m in many cases, but the truth is science has done just fine when botanists took vouchers and called them to the nearest 1km point.
I would be against removing research grade based on Xm accuracy unless we were talking rather large circles.
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yes people have done that for a long time but i also know the botanists who look for rare plants today and they spend tons of field time scouring areas for these old occurrences and often times never find them and thus never know if it is extirpated, a wrong location, or just hard to find. The maps given to towns show huge circles which the towns often mis-interpret as the plant covering the whole area. Often times the data is, indeed, totally useless or worse, super frustrating because you know something was there, but you can’t figure out where So while yes it’s been done and yes, sometimes there are still reasons to do it if you don’t have other options, it also definitely comes with big problems.
I’m not even arguing for the research grade thing here any more, it just is really frustrating when people just don’t care to collect good location data now that it is super easy to do.
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I would agree I use two GPS stand alone units on top of the GPS’s on my camera and photo I also run Gaia Maps on my tablet and record every place I go every day with a time stamp just in case
All of my photos are time stamped so if the GPS goes out I can reference the time of the photo to the time stamp on the app
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Regarding the old records and 1km or nearest city locations, yes that did and does happen, and in many cases you can drill down into the field journals of those concerned and glean extra details.
Maybe the key thing is to encourage good data, but don’t get too locked into it having to happen. If the data is not useful, skip over it. There is nothing to stop anyone using the data adding a field to include or exclude obs from their result sets, and then reviewing them on an obs by obs basis… useful, not useful… ask some Qs and see if it can become useful… and so on.
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Good idea! What about putting this into a feature request?
I also often walk along a specific stretch of trail, and since I don’t always remember exactly where on the trail I took the photo, I sometimes have to put a bigger accuracy circle that I would like to.
Well said, @kiwifergus. iNaturalist is a volunteer resource. The options for data quality are (1) discourage people who have a low bar so that they leave the site (2) help volunteers understand why good data quality is important or (3) put up with a certain amount of poor quality and look for ways to filter it. Options 2 and 3 are in the spirit of iNaturalist. Option 1 isn’t.
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I had no intentions to offend you. I apologise if I did.
Observations of Seedlings, Flowers, Fruit during different life stages may be valuable while observed by multiple users.
I’ve decided to start using the GPX logger as I think it may increase the speed of my workflow. The software I initially tried couldn’t sync to my time, so I’ll keep looking for apps for Android phone – Windows Desktop as discussed in the other tutorial thread.
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For those suggesting phone GPS + camera, just an fyi, there are still those of us who for various reasons don’t have smartphones. Brilliant idea to do things like taking photos of the GPS coordinates right after the specimen picture, but just take care to not assume everyone has access to a smartphone or GPS unit with decent accuracy. Especially for users in countries that aren’t as plugged in to that. Not being the best data doesn’t automatically make it not good.
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well, there are cameras that have GPS in them also, and in addition lower end smartphones with GPS are cheaper than most stand alone cameras, at least in my observation. Obviously if someone doesn’t have GPS one way or another they can’t use it to track location. It is what it is. The idea to photograph GPS is a good one. And as far as i know it is possible to use a garmin type GPS and a camera and then correspond the photos.
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Since this feature request is in limbo while Tony brings this up with the team, I’m going to close this topic until there are further details.
In the meantime, if you only want to show research grade observations with precise points, you can use the URL qualifier acc_below= and enter a number in meters, e.g. High precision Research Grade white pines (< 25 m)
Feel free to yell my way or continue the conversation about when to close feature requests. I waffled between closing this topic or not, but I do think it’s wandered off topic and that conversations about accessibility to GPS or the best ways to geotag photos are better held elsewhere than this specific topic.
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