The issue is more that except with some very obvious species, you usually can’t identify something without knowing where on the planet it was, at least which side of the continent.
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Right, it’s especially an issue with less-than-perfect photos. For instance, it’s often possible to see enough even in a pretty bad photo to ID a Northern Mockingbird (a very common bird in the United States), but if you don’t know where the photo was taken, it could be a Tropical Mockingbird (which doesn’t occur north of the Yucatan Peninsula).
As I recall, it used to be possible to get the general area of a “Location Private” photo by going to the “Suggestions” tab, where “Place” would default to the municipality/county where the photo was taken. I don’t know why this was changed.
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I think location has a lot to do with identification. Because it is genitalia (and often internal structures) that differentiate spiders, virtually no spider can be identified to species level from a photograph. However, there are lists of what is known to be present (eg in New Zealand), and that relatively short list is enough to be able to rely (in some cases) on more visual secondary characters, such as abdominal pattern. Can those visual characters be relied on 100%? No! But short of killing and dissecting every organism, or pulling off a leg and testing for dna, we have to accept a level at which we do rely on them.
You can consider this in another way. Take the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus)… If you see one you can be pretty assured it is a platypus, right? But who is to say there are not very similar looking species on other planets/systems? Observed on planet Earth we can be pretty confident it is this species, but if we don’t have the knowledge of where it is photographed, then we can’t be certain! But let’s face it, we can almost guarantee that any photograph in an observation is going to be on Earth, right? Let’s get away from the extreme case, and come back down to Earth… if I observe a platypus in Australia, I am going to be a lot more certain of the ID than I would if I observed one in the Amazon! In the Amazon I would be wanting a lot closer look to determine if it IS a platypus, or some as yet undiscovered closely related new species!
There are countless situations where location isn’t going to be helpful, but there are so many situations in the past where just knowing if it was in a bach at the beach or a hut in the mountains, would have made a huge difference in the ID of a spider!
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And yet, if I cite location for a subspecies (or allopatric species) identification I get shouted down and told that I need some physically visible feature to make the ID, otherwise my ID is nothing more than a locality name.
But I agree 100% that locality is important for identification.
That was not the point though, interesting though the discussion is.
The thread above was muddling locality certainty with ID certainty.
Locality certainty is an entirely different issue affecting DQA - it pertains to the certainty of the observation in space and should be separated entirely from Identification certainty…
There are some cases where location uncertainty will affect identification certainty, but that is a separate evaluation, independently of the former. There might even be instances where locality error is within the tolerance for Locality DQA, but not adequate for Identification certainty.
Both of these are separate from Private Localities which are not uncertain, but not provided (which is an entirely different issue - and IMHO should automatically exclude the observation from the community ID process entirely, in exactly the same way that opting out of community ID does).
2 posts were split to a new topic: Classifying Subspecies Based on Location Only- Good Practice or No?
Ignore the shouters, especially if they offer little to change your mind/position
I wish I could follow everything you are discussing. Since I can’t, I’m just going to throw a specific question out here. Does it seem right that a plant found only in a couple of coast range counties in California http://bonap.net/FieldMaps/Home/SingleMap?taxonId=1139&mapType=County is obscured so that it shows up in a search of Placer County, CA (eastern Central Valley and Sierra Nevada foothills)? It seems so far from any part of its range.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/11352005
It was mapped somewhere within that green square. If the plant isn’t known to occur there it’s either a new population or mapped wrong.
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The location accuracy is 111 km. Would that have been chosen by the observer, or by the obscure feature?
The user. See this open issue:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/obscuring-rectangle-on-obs-with-large-accuracy-circles-may-not-encompass-true-location/703
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ah that would do it. i thought things with that low of accuracy wouldn’t show on range maps though
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It doesn’t display on the taxon page map or Explore map, but as paloma said, it still shows up on place checklists (Placer County) and search results:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/77811-Lomatium-hooveri
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?&place_id=2283&taxon_id=77811
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Is that intentional for some reason? I’m wondering if the huge accuracy circle observations need to show up in Explore and checklists.
to be honest i’d rather if they showed up nowhere at all though i know opinions vary.
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It turned out that the observation I was interested in was in the wrong county because of faulty GPS. The observer didn’t realized she had the wrong location or a large accuracy circle. She explained here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/11352005 So now it is on the map in the correct place, and I’m glad now it was findable. But based on this example maybe there needs to be a warning system in place for people, so that they’re notified right away if their observation shows up somewhere it’s never been known to exist before. It was lucky on this one that the observer was still around, since it had been a year almost.
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That would be wonderful if we had that kind of data available. But currently things are (legitimately) being added to new places every day in iNaturalist. Warning messages at this stage would be numerous, and might have unintended consequences (people second-guessing their own IDs, etc.).
Now if the system could maybe detect when the distance between two timestamps would have required travel at, say, more than 300 km/hour, that might catch some bad location coordinates…
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I think it would be neat to tag things more than say, 100 miles from the nearest other observation, with some kind of filterable ‘outlier’ badge… then one could search those IDs to look for things that are either neat new discoveries, or identified wrong/not marked as captive. Of course some taxa are poorly documented here or anywhere else so it would be hard to know…
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I’m not sure if this is the best place for this, but I’m running into issues on several fronts with the obscured location represented by a randomized point. See comments on: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9916871#activity_comment_2791842 . I’ve had land managers raise issues with other special status species as well. They don’t understand that the point is actually obscured and does not in fact represent a locality on their land. I’ve had to set some of my observations to private as a means to cope with this. I think there needs to be some much more obvious means of designating points as obscured.
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Hmm, yeah there was an older thread about that issue but I can’t easily search it now because it’s on my phone. But lots of things. Firstly it’s true that this display method is problematic and there have been some proposals to fix it. Secondly, if someone is using inat for something as official and important as RTE surveys they should really understand how it works better. Really they should be using the tool California fish and wildlife has to track RTE. Thirdly why is it even obscured? Is there really a collection risk here ?
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There’s “should” and then there’s reality. Maybe minimally display a legend with the dot maps indicating that the faint dots represent obscured rather than actual localities?
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