Hello,
I’m looking for a way to not only see the seasonal distribution of records, but the distribution by height of an observed species.
For example for mosses, we have it like this:
That would be nice for other species, too. Is there a way to do so in iNat?
Thanks for any help.
Kind regards,
chbluete.
Several major issues with elevation data from observations are that observations are often not fully accurate to the location and this can result in major deviations in elevation from the actual site, that even if the location is fully accurate the elevation information on the basemap used by iNat is not accurate due to the low 3D mapping resolution, and that the elevation for handheld GPS units (let alone phones and camera based GPS) is often very inaccurate.
Personally, as someone who uses GPS data often in their work and who worked on surveys of alpine club mosses I would not trust elevation data extracted from iNat to be accurate enough to be a valid source of that sort of information.
That’s not a criticism of iNat, it’s just that there are too many variables and points of potential inaccuracy in the datasets as there is no real uniformity or set protocol for how the data is collected.
I think even though the data can deviate due to location errors combined with low resolution elevation model, it will provide a decent understanding of the distribution in most cases.
for example if you find a a species at high elevation but usually it’s only seen around sea level, that might be a good indictator to take a closer look and see if there are look-alikes. And the amount of observations where the elevation is off by hundreds of meters will be marginal (you’ll need very steep cliffs for that)
I thinkthis fuzziness exists for a lot of spices descriptions and environmental indicators. For example when dealing with moth you often have a bunch of environmental factors you take into consideration when your are trying to confirm that you identified the right species.
But the descriptions are like ‘often seen on birch trees but are also found on maple and other broad-leaved trees’. So only the combination of different factors will increase confidence in correct ID.
Elevation can be one of these factors
I haven’t seen an elevation field when entering an observation. Elevation is one of the data I collect for most of my observations, which are referenced to traverse points in surveys, but there are a few locations where I’ve observed something, found it on the map, and don’t know the elevation.
(not using elevation) but the
Geomodel Anomaly has 14.7K mosses
Thanks a lot for all your answers. So it seems, that I haven’t overlooked something from the technical use of the website to find the corresponding information.
Thanks for all the background info and thoughts on the topic. It is clear, that the information is more or less accurate depending on the region and the technology used.
However, it does provide some additional information, if you don’t know a region well, don’t know the species well, or similar and you don’t need to look for a book containing this information first. Or just for fun, you have made the ‘highest find’ or the ‘deepest find’. This can be an additional motivation to document a species in iNat and bring iNat forwards.
I would find it a good feature to have additionally to the seasonal mapping a chart for the elevation (thanks for the correct wording). Perhaps I could think about a feature request, if more people are interested in… I need to have a closer look first, how to create one. O:)
Elevation has been requested and declined previously. You can see related discussion and workarounds in these topics (and others):
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/altitude-on-observations/1476
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/filter-by-elevation/5606
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/add-a-link-to-google-earth-for-altitude-information/37680
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/an-optimized-workflow-to-determine-the-altitude-of-an-observation/17465
Thank you very much for the links to the topics that I had not found. Most of them do not directly address my question, but if the calculation from the map has already been rejected, success is unlikely. What a pity. That would have been an interesting analysis.
Our national database calculates the altitude for each observation using the coordinates and the specified accuracy as a range from the map. Unfortunately, however, this information is not displayed in a sort of map.
You can readily download the data you’re interested in, filter based on location accuracy, and calculate this yourself using a Digital Elevation Model in QGIS or similar.
For individual observations, you can see the elevation by clicking on Details and then Macrostrat:
Thank you very much. A great workaround! I can work well with it.
