Having an accuracy radius on your location can be important to some data users

[pisum]

@jhbratton

But if the data are not gathered at sufficiently fine resolution in the first place, they can’t be used for site protection.

is this some sort of actual regulation or law? or is this just some arbitrary personal rule or bureaucractic prioritization thing, such as:

@cynips

when the Swedish Forest Agency determines whether to allow logging or not. They only consider observations with an accuracy of 100 m or less. Else, they get too much data(!) which is also more difficult to assess because of the uncertainty, and they have very little time for each submitted case.

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@jhbratton

Multiple species records from the same habitat patch such as a wood or pond can add up to a case for protecting the site

so if you have multiple occurence records with no accuracy value recorded from roughly the same location, you’re saying that is of absolutely no value? but if someone adds an arbitrary accuracy value to two of these records, then magically, it’s valuable?

if i’m some sort of rogue activist, i could just go around adding fake multiple records with accuracy values, and i can stop development? nobody’s going to go and actually survey / groundtruth the land to check the data posted by randos on the internet?

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@invertebratist

bulk adding accuracy values is not the hardest thing to do on the web and it helps in many situations as well, especially because it means the observer at least assessed the accuracy of their coordinates, while leaving it blank means they didn’t.

this is totally not true. bulk adding accuracy values just means someone added an accuracy value. it doesn’t say anything about whether the observer assesssed their location or accuracy or whether they just added the same arbitrary value to all their observations.

here’s a real example. there’s a pond at a park in my area that has some Nymphoides plants. those plants are isolated to a single pond that is labeled as “Arboretum Lake” on Google Maps and the “Meadow Pond” on OSM.

Below are all the verifiable observations of Nymphoides in Memorial Park. note that there are observations clustered at the pond, but also at the Arboretum headquarters building, and a few others scattered throughout the park.

A lot of people mention that scientists who care about fine-scale accuracy will filter for observations with accuracy <= 50m. so let’s do that. note that you’ve fitlered out a few of the outliers, but you still have a cluster at Arboretum headquarters, and there are still a few one-offs.

when i look at these outliers and compare them to other observations their observers have made, half (2) appear to be cases where people added an arbitrary accuracy value , and the other half (2) appear to be cases where iOS determined a location with a very low accuracy value (but was very wrong).

now let’s look at our observations that had no accuracy recorded. there’s one at Arboretum headquarters, and there’s another one-off. did you really improve the quality of the data by excluding these observations?

if you don’t like that example, here’s another example of a patch of Alligator Flag isolated to another pond:

• all observations: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=83006&subview=map&taxon_id=127912
• accuracy <= 50m: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?acc=true&acc_below=50&place_id=83006&subview=map&taxon_id=127912
• no accuracy: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?acc=false&place_id=83006&subview=map&taxon_id=127912

pick any example of an organism that you know exists at a particular location, and do the same examination of the observations in iNaturalist. does excluding observations with no accuracy help in any of these cases?

here’s another example i’ve provided in the past with a different sort of visualization: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/location-accuracy-too-easily-bypassed/18547/31.

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@deboas

Even if there is variation in how that is generated or what it means, as @pisum has pointed out, that’s not a reason to discard the importance of recording precision. It would be like finding a few Research Grade observations that are wrongly identified - sure, this is not ideal, but it doesn’t mean that we should conclude that the identifications of all Research Grade observations are useless.

you would think that the people who are the most concerned about accuracy values would also be the ones most concerned about having and understanding of what those accuracy values actually mean.

if you’re just going to wave off inconsistencies in locations / accuracies, why not just wave off the lack of accuracy values, too? what’s the difference?

to me a better analogy to the inconsistencies in the locations / accuracies would be like allowing folks to identify their observations using any taxonomy they want without noting which framework they’re using. for example, i could have 3 different people observe the same plant. one of them could call it Hibiscus lasiocarpos, another could call it Hibiscus moscheutos ssp. lasiocarpos, and the last one could call it Hibiscus moscheutos, and they would all be right according to their view of how things should be classified. the issue isn’t that anyone is wrong. the issue is that they’re inconsistent. would you use that data as is without dealing with those inconsistencies?