I recently went down a rabbit hole trying to figure out what the deal is with Eastern Gray Squirrel reports in Southern California. As far as I know, there are no established populations of that species in Southern California, though they are established further north around San Francisco, among other places.
However, there are (or were) dozens of reports of Eastern Gray Squirrels in Southern California. All of them are single reports in the last few years, with no other reports from the same general area. Some of these areas are incredibly popular with iNatters, so the lack of any follow up reports of an easy to see and photograph animal is odd. Digging deeper, a number of these reports showed obvious signs of being misplotted (mismatching metadata, backgrounds not matching the location, a history of other observations by the same observer also being misplotted). Those I marked as “location inaccurate”.
The observations that remains have no metadata, most seem to be cropped versions of an original photo. The majority are from observers that have a few to a few dozen observations, all in a time and place that strongly suggests they are students that were required to do an iNat project for a class. Most of the users are no longer active, and don’t respond to requests to confirm the location. I suspect what’s happening is that students see a squirrel, but can’t get a photo. So they take a photo from a friend, or from online, and use that photo, thinking that all squirrels are pretty much the same, and plot in at their location instead of where it was actually seen.
I’m unsure what to do with observations like this. For introduced species, iNat can be a valuable resource in tracking new or potential introductions, but only if the observations are accurate. I don’t want to mark accurate observations as inaccurate, but at the same time I’m 100% sure that most of those observations aren’t accurate, and are obscuring the true range and spread of this species.