Hi,
I stumbled upon this strange set of observations; all from a single user, supposedly spread around the far reaches of a disputed part of highland rainforest between south Suriname and Guyana:
It is already extremely hard to believe that someone made such a journey covering such a vast surface area of rainforest within a few days in such a short timeframe.
But if you are a faithful kind of person, then pictures of wooden tables, electric cables, fences, grassy fields in the middle of the jungle, etc. might convince you otherwise.
<y question is: how to deal with these observations? many are research grade by ID, but the location is clearly incorrect. I know i can manually flag the location as incorrect, but doing this for a total of 227 observations is tedious. Is there an option to flag all of these observations at once? Can this be reported somehow? BTW, the user seems to be a legitimate user for many other sightings, here he simply did something thats not appropriate imo.
Welcome to the iNat Forum!
Because the Forum isn’t a place to call out other users specifically, I’ve deleted links in the post above to make it more general (see the Forum Guidelines which note “The forum is not a place to call out individual users or post links to examples of bad iNat behavior. Please use flags on iNat for that content and only write descriptions here.” I also moved it from “Tutorials” to “General”.
In answer to the question - there isn’t a way to flag all of these in bulk. I would suggest creating a flag on iNat and leaving links to additional other examples as you did here along with your reasoning for why you think that the locations are incorrect. I would also leave a polite comment asking the user to explain their side of the issue. Depending on the outcome, the DQA can be used to tag these for having incorrect locations (or dates) as may be appropriate. If there are large scales issues of bad faith data fabrication, curators can suspend users, especially if they are continuing.
Send an email to help@inaturalist.org with as much information as possible to help staff investigate the issue and do any batch actions that would be faster than leaving it to an individual end-user to fix or flag, especially given the sheer number of observations with incorrect locations.
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The best way to start in these cases is to leave a comment on one or more of the observations asking the observer to check the location, as this could be an honest mistake.
For example, I have seen sets of observations clearly taken in California that were mapped off the coast of North Korea because the observer omitted the minus sign in entering the longitude. The area you mentioned is about 58 W, 4N. If they accidentally entered it as 58N, 4E, they could be in Scotland, for example. If the species pictured are South American, it is a different mistake, but still probably unintentional.
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Apologies, was not aware of that. I left a comment on one of his sightings, and flagged another with a link that includes the whole bunch of sightings.
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I don’t know what interface you usually use to look at observations, but in case you aren’t aware of this, I want to point out a method that may reduce the tediousness of this slightly: you can open the user’s observations in the Identify module, go to the Data Quality tab to mark the location as inaccurate, and use arrow keys to page through the observations until you have addressed the ones you are concerned about.
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I would use DQA for location inaccurate for those. Your single vote can easily be countered, but it makes the obs Casual. If you get a reply to your comment, and they change their location - then you can delete your DQA vote.
Since we don’t get notified about DQA, it is good to leave a comment as well - which does trigger notifications for IDs or comments.
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