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

[theresephillips]

oh okay I thought the obscured setting was for inaccurate location measurements. oops. thanks for the clarification btw.

[deboas]

Think about accuracy values like annotations or cropping your photo. These things are nice to have, and add some value to your observations, but they’re not mandatory. If it is stressful or complicates your workflow to add them, please don’t worry about them. It’s more important that you are checking that the locations you add are correct, as you mentioned you do.

A quarter of verifiable iNaturalist observations lack accuracy values, and they have been used for lots of research purposes. Each researcher will filter the data according to their research question, and will make their own assumptions about what these values represent.

[pisum]

@fluffyinca

We want to encourage people to provide data that is as correct and precise as possible.

nobody disagrees with the general idea of having accurate locations, and there are plenty of things along those lines which are noncontroversial:

• ask folks to double-check their locations to make sure they look reasonable? fine.
• share techniques for making sure your phone gets the best coordinates? great.
• provide some information about the inherent error in maps and satellite images? great.
• compare the different ways coordinates and accuracy values can be input into the system? great.

but if you start a thread by pushing a particular workflow that’s for the benefit of a limited set of use cases, and you characterize it as a workflow as something that’s important for everyone to adopt, then expect some pushback.

“as correct and precise as possible” is so squishy. should people record detailed location descriptions (ex. “5 meters east of the NE corner of the intersection of X Street and Y Road, in the ditch, in Town A, State B, Country C”) rather than just rely on the location descriptions returned by reverse geocoding? should people start recording detailed descriptions about how they determined their locations (ex. “using a Garmin XXX, using spatial reference WGS 1984, with 10 satellites visible”)? should people go out and buy expensive GPS units rated for sub-meter accuracy and take those out with them when observing?

every additional action comes with costs and benefits. so don’t just say that recording an accuracy value is “important” and expect folks to do it because that’s the “best” way to do it. instead, explain what kinds of use cases may use accuracy values, explain how the accuracy values would be used in these cases, explain how they should be captured to be useful for these use cases, and then let folks decide whether they think it’s so important to them that they should spend their time capturing that information.

kzoebel said it another way:

@kzoebel

There is always a way to allow for more information, the question is whether or not it adds anything substantial to the observation. We could ask users to additionally check a box that they’re “really really sure that the location is accurate” but where do you stop?

…

finally, i will just say that as much as people seem to want observers to put extra effort into recording locations accurately and precisely, i just wish that people would put that same level of interest in making sure users of data understand how to best use the data as it exists.

[invertebratist]

Summarising the points again (thanks everyone for a lot of different viewpoints)

・The idea of accuracy radius is that, the observation was certainly made somewhere WITHIN the circle.

・Accuracy radius is an international standard for scientific records, because GPS coordinates only represent a dot and it can be frequently inaccurate if you think logically.

a dot have no area, so it can be only accurate when the coordinate is perfectly on top of the organism, which rarely happens.

Even if you think your coordinates are most precise, are you sure that it sits on top of the leaf you photographed? If not, adding an accuracy of a couple meters will theoretically make the locality more accurate, and more importantly, people will know that it’s very precise, with that tiny radius.

・GBIF and many other databases have columns for accuracy radius although it’s not required.

・for many scientific purposes, adding accuracy radius makes your data more reliable / useful, but not always significantly more.

・BUT, there are also many scientific research projects that don’t require accuracy radius values too.

・Adding accuracy radius cause nothing negative, except for your extra effort and time.

・Adding accuracy radius seems to be harder / more complicated on app. Let’s use the web…

Data without accuracy radius are not anything useless are still fine for a lot of purposes, but in some situations it could be considered less reliable and filtered out.

So, if you’re really keen about maximizing usability of your data, adding it might be a good idea.

It’s kind of similar to things like getting better photos or including rulers in your observations etc - can be important sometimes but not a deal-breaker if you don’t.

(p.s. t

@paul_dennehy

species is. If 100 people observe a bird, that bird was 100 times more observed than a bird only observed by 1 person, and it will show up 100 times more on iNat. This isn’t a bug or a problem or a pitfall to be avoided- it’s exactly what iNat was meant for. If someone wants to try to extrapolate actual species abundances from iNat’s dataset, they’re going to need to do some serious “massaging” of the data to get anything useful, because that’s simply not what iNat’s format is intended to record.

[FingIs]

When I input my GPS-derived images (I don’t like the software automatically taking my metadata, so I uncheck that box), I then go to Google Maps to create a digital version of the coordinates (it never likes my out-of-the-camera numbers). But I don’t know why the area box has a default of a wide zone. Perhaps it’s for the best, but I’m not sure what it’s chosen and why.

[bbk-htx]

I apologize, but that is not what I meant to do or imply.
deboas explained things better.

[vladimir_fuka]

If the coordinates from the phone GPS are reasonably accurate (which is easier to check when making the observation with the app directly, but I mostly make them from the photo gallery later), I would not bother doing anything more. Everyone understands that the GPS can have some uncertainty, typically in the order of meters, but with outliers in low tens of meters.

[JKT]

@arthur_chapman

Also - if you are taking a photo of an animal (say a bird) - you are generally not right where the bird actually is. If you are giving an accuracy of 1m - that is more likely the position of the photographer than of the object being photographed. There is no shame in giving an accuracy of 10m or so - or 100-200 m of a bird in the distance.

That is exactly what I do. If the subject is expected to be within GPS accuracy I usually don’t touch it and then there is no accuracy. That usually goes for flowers, insects etc.

The birds usually get the location moved to approximate location of the bird itself and then the accuracy can be quite poor.

If I don’t have a GPS track to match with the pictures, I give the location manually with accuracy circle. Those can have quite small circle, but that is based on the Google map, which has its own accuracy as discussed earlier. Those small circles are often obscured as they tend to be around houses or cottages of people I know.

[Italopithecus]

It may be foundamental, especially with plants that can be potentially, or likely, cultivated.
Many users unfortunately do not understand/still do not know the importance of adding a photo of a plant in its environment. So, having available the precise position with a very restricted radius is often necessary to distinguish something which is only cultivated from the same species that could have escaped from cultivation. It is not rare to see such observations with the position centered on a city and the radius of some kilometers, sometimes well extending over the city boundaries.
The same may apply also to species that are linked to peculiar environments but may also have a similar related species that may grow in a totally different habitat. So, knowing the exact position may be useful for the identification.

[olrett]

for research, we throw out anything without an accuracy or that has an accuracy that is too large.

Tough luck then. If you and others like you are not interested in what those of us post with a larger circle of confusion, then go ahead, throw it out. Fine by me. It means those observations are not needed anyway. It also means that we can continue using larger circles of confusion to keep ourselves safe. (I’ve explained my reasons here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-encourage-users-to-provide-a-more-precise-position/42565/21)

My experience is that If researchers are indeed interested in my observations (perhaps because they show that a particular species is moving east/west/north/southwards), then they contact me – and I will gladly provide them with the actual coordinates. My public iNat observations however will remain deliberately fuzzy, because I am more concerned about my safety than about anybody’s research. The projects I participate in are also given the coordinates, but by email, not via iNaturalist.

[sriharsha444]

iNat dosent let u have an accuracy below 1m as far as i know. I make my ones sometimes less 1m and they dont show the acurracy meter after that lol.

[klauswehrlin]

I cannot see the sense of an accuracy of geographical location of less than 1m as to the best of my knowledge there are no GPS system that could go to that accuracy.
Obviously you work in a different field of research with different “home ranges” … please explain ;-)

[ifesbob]

I’m a little confused about why marking exactly where a bird is versus where the observer is is necessary. If it’s hundreds of meters away and you somehow got a usable picture of it, sure, but I don’t really understand it with most bird pictures I’ve taken and seen, since most bird observations are taken a distance from the bird they’re likely to traverse anyway. To give an example, if I’m on a walk and I take a picture of an American robin on a fence post 10 feet away. The robin has likely been where I’m standing, or easily could have been. If you’re interested in robin distribution, why would on the trail vs. on the fence post matter? I guess maybe if you wanted to know that, for example, bald eagles frequently perch on this specific tree or something like that, but I don’t really get it otherwise when birds are highly mobile. Actually in general I’m maybe missing a use case for the data where organism vs. observer positioning is important, unless we’re talking about a claimed incredibly narrow accuracy radius (like within a meter of the true location).

[pisum]

@ifesbob

I’m a little confused about why marking exactly where a bird is versus where the observer is is necessary.

it’s not necessary. there’s absolutely no consistency in how locations are determined across observations. so just do whatever you like.

[petezani]

I had a case this spring where I was trying to document first frog calls of the spring. I could hear Spring Peepers way over yonder, but good luck getting through the wetland to get close enough to narrow down location…but I knew about where it was in that direction. So, I put the pin about where I thought it was and used the accuracy bubble to indicate where I was. I explained this in the observation by saying, I think the frog pond was at the pin, but I was way over here on the north side of the accuracy bubble. My accuracy really wasn’t as big as the bubble, but I was using it to convey additional context for the observation.

[ifesbob]

That makes sense to me. I think the information can often be useful, but I also think in many cases observer vs. organism is not truly necessary information, this being an exception. But I don’t think it ever hurts to put organism location instead of observer location.

[jasonhernandez74]

@deboas

throw away everything with accuracy values that are too large, or missing.

Although I disagree in principle, this is upsetting me enough that I just went back to check whether there is a default accuracy circle for mobile uploads. The two that I uploaded today have a circle of 7m. Is this acceptable? I presume this is a default setting, since I didn’t adjust it.

When i upload from my computer, the page with the accuracy circle is a normal part of the workflow.

[jdmore]

@jasonhernandez74

I just went back to check whether there is a default accuracy circle for mobile uploads. The two that I uploaded today have a circle of 7m. Is this acceptable? I presume this is a default setting, since I didn’t adjust it.

Not sure which mobile app you are using, but the following responses from earlier in this topic probably explain what is going on.

@tiwane

@pisum

the iNat app is requesting a location from the Android OS’s internal location services. from what i remember, as soon as Android returns a location that has accuracy <= 10m, the iNat app takes that value and records it in the observation record.

Yes, this should be the case. As far as I know the iNat app doesn’t add accuracy data to the photos it saves, and I believe most Android devices do not record it with their default camera app.

@pisum

it may be worth noting, too, that Android’s definition of positional accuracy is that the true location has a 68% probability of being within that number of meters from the recorded coordinates.

iOS’s positioning error is not defined publicly, as far as i know, except to say that their is as least as good as Android’s definition. this is why this should be expected at least some of the time:

[bouteloua]

As far as typical mobile uploads go 7m is great.

[crellow]

It may be tiresome, but it’s not OpenStreetMap’s fault. It’s part and parcel of using remotely-sensed imagery from different providers, with different resolutions, quality assurance, etc etc.