In general … if you put 8 billion chimps on a planet with herps, it will be bad for the herps. And for anything else really. There will be massive abuse of any single good effort, of any good idea, of any invention. In that regard, pointing fingers at those few chimps who actually care, who are interested in conservation and therefore organise their effort, seems … cheap …
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there’s a segment of herpers who dislike iNaturalist, and most of them seem associated with a ‘competing’ site so i question their bias, to be honest. I think herp species that are at risk of collection should be obscured, and also other observations that can be directly linked to those observations. However, the inat obscuring algorithm has gotten tighter over the years, and the idea that things like bullfrogs and garter snakes should be obscured is, to be blunt, completely absurd.
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that is evidence of herpers damaging the site, but does not indicate how they found it.
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I would love to see this too.
I ‘found’ an extremely rare plant that was obscured because there is obviously only one place it could be; the box was around the downtown of a city where it could never survive outside of a single park… so it was dead obvious where the plant was. I could see it from the parking lot. A bigger box would’ve made it difficult if not impossible to pinpoint, but at present it doesn’t really cover that large of an area and it’s especially obvious for items that are near extensive development. So at minimum, it would be nice to give users who are aware of these issues better options to protect the subjects of their observations, especially since some of us are withholding observations because there currently isn’t a way to post them without worrying about someone immediately finding them. There’s definitely room for improvement on location privacy.
Personally, though, I’m extremely skeptical of the necessity behind having exact GPS coordinates for everything be public by default to begin with. I obscure all of my observations and only have them viewable to 2 people from a state agency; no one else is even half as trustworthy with rare plant locations and frankly there’s no practical purpose for anyone else looking. I don’t want people to be able to see where I’ve found orchids and wild azaleas. I do like to get ID help from the public, but I don’t see a benefit to having other people be able to retrace my steps exactly and so on. Having an option to further obscure things would help reduce possible harm from posting.
However, just because I try to be careful doesn’t mean that other people are, and I think there is a significant issue there that that post addresses. I would guess about 50% of iNat users in my area post a few times and then never return to their accounts, and plenty of people never check comments even if they do log back in. Most people post with public coordinates.
Even people who should know better sometimes don’t obscure things; I got to see Newton’s Larkspur last year because someone posted a strange Larkspur that obviously was something rare and didn’t get obscured until it got multiple other people IDing it. The observation said Newton’s Larkspur and it had a public location when I looked at it. If I could grab that data, so could a poacher, and if you switch the situation to an orchid (and orchids aren’t obscured by default, even something highly poachable like Showy Orchid), well… that’s not ideal. I’m sure that iNat has contributed to poaching. Sure, there are other ways to poach, but it’s pretty stream-lined when you can open a website and get exact GPS coordinates to an orchid, or those people’s case, snake dens.
Also, in regards to other replies… I am a little bit unimpressed by the derailing comments of “well there’s other threats that are bigger so we don’t need to care”. Learn to sit with your discomfort, not push it away and try to blame somebody else as a means to avoid retrospection. An issue does not have to be the biggest, flashiest thing in existence to warrant attention. Additionally, it would take very few people to change iNaturalist’s location policies, whereas solving habitat loss is perhaps impossible and even mitigating it would take hundreds of millions of people worldwide to make a serious impact. That is more than worth acknowledging. In reality, where there is nuance, a combination of structural and individual changes need to be made, not one or the other, and it’s easier to start with something smaller that requires the persuasion of far fewer people.
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We can protect only what we know, exact locations should be open for everything but very vulnerable species, imo opening as much as we can brings more positive results than trying to obscure each organism you meet.
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There are a lot of reasons granular public data can be helpful. One of the main reasons I can think of is for research. If there is less friction for researchers to access data from places like iNat it’s easier for them to try different ideas and push their research forward at a faster rate. I would argue there are a lot of other benefits as well.
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This comes up every now and then. While i of course have no issue with people obscuring all their observations for whatever reason they want, i mostly don’t obscure mine, want to share the exact locations for both my job and personal reasons, and probably wouldn’t use inat much if it didn’t allow precise mapping. It would be pretty useless for my own purposes. I think it would be useful for individual users to be able to set default to be obscured, or to obscure all their observations at once easily if they decide they need to for any reason.
this is thrown around a bunch but i’ve never actually seen any concrete proof of it. I still think obscuring species that are risk from poaching makes sense, but i wish the otherwise science minded community wouldn’t assume stuff like this by default. There are balances here. Yes, iNat makes observation locations visible which might help poachers but it also could help others keep an eye on a plant. Things that are hidden are more likely to be stolen than things out in the open and there may be a reduction of poaching in some ways too since things are more visible and since there is more public awareness of what is around. Poachers already have probably some of the best ecological info out there, they just use it for poaching. Has poaching increased in areas with lots of iNat observations since iNat started? Even that i’m not sure there’s any evidence of.
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yes and also i want to add the reminder that gatekeeping of obscured data in most websites and spaces is usually based on being active in academia, which is… something that is not available to many marginalized groups. Also, there’s no reason poachers wouldn’t be in academia; in fact i believe many are though i also can’t back that up. Limiting science to a small in-group isn’t automatically a good idea. As another example… obscured biodiversity data is often made available to consultants and … developers. And while this may help them avoid impacts to individual populations, this is also the group of people probably responsible for most extinctions. So yeah.
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That’s a really good point on accessibility. The benefits of open data are often overlooked.
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If I may suggest; I have always been of the belief that the most important groups that should know about the presence of species of concern are the more local groups like city park districts, county forest preserves, or if you have any non-government conservation groups in your area. In cases where what you found isn’t on their land, then they may not be able to do much with it, but even then it might influence a future purchase decision. If it is on their land, then that would absolutely influence restoration plans. The agencies that I work with are very small and I am the only bird or bee observer getting them data, and there are thousands of acres to search. Your sightings might be the first they are aware of those things on their land.
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There’s no easy to answer to this, and we’re trying to navigate it the best we can. I know one point made in the meetings we’ve had with state heritage reps and NatureServe is that we often just don’t know for sure how bad actors (or at least uncaring/unaware ones) find locations. A lot of it is guessing and hypothesizing. That’s not to say iNat has never been a source for bad actions - just proving it, and especially what if any the extent of it is, is difficult. But I totally understand the concerns.
Some people don’t value the organism and the habitat more than they do something else (money, notoriety, Instagram likes, etc), and I honestly think that’s where the solution to the problem is. Through various means, and hopefully iNat and the iNat community can be part of that, the calculus needs to change. Several rattlesnake roundups, for example, have chosen better options for the snakes due to cultural and regulatory pushback (although far too many still exist, IMO, but that’s a different topic).
Or just communicating with others about best practices is great - I mean, someone had to tell me how to flip cover and return it properly. And making people aware of the downsides of bird baiting, for example, is the kind of thing that can change minds and eventually cultures.
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Two earlier relevant discussions
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/people-who-break-rules-in-parks-nwrs-etc/9758/16
and some very unhappy comments on this one - why do you always have to spoil everything?!
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/rock-stacking-is-it-ok/24187
I just wanted to ask since we are missing a huge educational opportunity in this discussion:
Can the experts here explain how to herp ethically?
Leave it all how you found it.
Dont squish the herp.
Keep the interactions short and dont touch unless needed.
Take only photos not herps.
Anything else?
iNat or not, obscured or not, I want to make sure I am not hurting the herps when I look for them.
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Especially for amphibians, don’t touch unless absolutely required. If moving between amphibian sites or handling multiple amphibians, use gloves, new (or disinfected since last use) containers, etc. Disinfect equipment and boots/waders.
https://www.arguk.org/info-advice/advice-notes/324-advice-note-4-amphibian-disease-precautions-a-guide-for-uk-fieldworkers-pdf-2/file
There are serious amphibian diseases that humans moving between sites or touching multiple individuals can spread.
I would also suggest not herping in highly trafficked areas that get a lot of pressure or in the same areas frequently. Even herpers using best practices could degrade a site or unduly stress individuals if the number of herpers going through the same site is high (ie, if a herp’s log is getting flipped everyday or two, etc.)
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I’d add:
Report any sightings of listed or uncommon herps to the relevant state/provincial/federal authorities, as well as to the landowner (if the landowner is a conservation entity). Don’t assume that uploading an observation to iNat or any other such database can substitute for a direct report to the state/etc. authority, as often the authority will need more information than is included in an iNat observation in order to determine if, say, scarce finances should be spent to protect the habitat or legal means used to regulate proposed development or other alterations. (I say this because I worked for 20 years for the Massachusetts Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program. Massachusetts has a relatively strong state Endangered Species Act and can regulate development on private land where that development conflict with state and federally listed species. An iNat observation is not sufficient legal evidence upon which to regulate.)
Think twice about why you’re going herping for rare or poachable species. Are you contributing to their conservation, or just satisfying your own curiosity (or ego, dare I say)? For that matter, think twice about going out to witness a Big Night (in the sense of a night where many amphibians are migrating simultaneously to breeding areas), particularly if you’re driving any distance. How many herps will you inevitably run over on a dark, rainy night, so that you can see a few with a flashlight near a vernal pool?
If you think there’s any chance of poaching (or killing of venomous snakes, for example), just don’t post those observations to iNat or anywhere else not tightly controlled. Again, why are you posting your observation? To boost your species count? To demonstrate how cool you are that can find Rare Species X?
Be humble. Many herps have existed as species for longer than humans have; you don’t want to contribute to their early demise.
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I see the points made on both sides of this argument, but always tend toward being more open, sharing, and trying to create a better world.
On a side note, from that IG post, someone mentioned misidentifying species as common ones to get around auto-obscuring threatened taxa. I have never even thought about this as a possibility because I’m not an asshole, but I feel like if there is even one ID as a rare species it should stay obscured until a consensus is reached… Anyone know how this works /have experience with it?
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that’s exactly how it works – if any active ID is of a taxon that gets obscured, the location is obscured
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That’s pretty much the reason our Baker’s Larkspur is going to be extinct soon though. A very few “trusted” people knew where it grew, but that trust circle did not include a couple of road maintenance crews, and 95% of the population got wiped out in a couple of hours. If more people had known where it grew, it would probably have survived.
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This is where the right circle of people and agencies with a “need to know” should be contacted and included for sharing location information. If a species is living on the edge of a road where maintenance actions might impact it, the state department of transportation or local road agency should be informed. That doesn’t guarantee protection … I’ve seen such information get lost, ignored, or simply not reach the right workers on the ground. It also depends on the legal status of the species, personnel turnover in the relevant agency, and whether that agency is concerned and proactive or not. It’s rarely easy.
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no, but it is a very concrete example of why obscuring data also can have direct negative conservation implications. There’s a fair bit of gatekeeping wrapped in here too, by some of the people who push for more obscuring, especially when they themselves have access to said data.
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