iNat's Preference for Location when Photographing Distant Animals

General
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Quick question that comes up frequently when I’m uploading observations:

If I’m sitting in my car on the side of the road and I photograph a hawk or deer or owl 100+ yards away in a field, where do I drop the location on the map? I can see 3 possible options:

  1. Drop it where I’m at, because that’s where I’m observing from
  2. Drop it where the animal is, because the point should represent the animal’s location
  3. Drop it in the middle somewhere and make an accuracy bubble that includes both me and the animal

Generally I go for option 2 when iNatting- i.e. if the hawk was in a tree on the other side of a field, I drop the point on that tree, regardless of where I was stationed to photograph it.

It might seem like a silly thing to even worry about, but I can think of two times when it may be significant:

  1. There is some border between me and the animal, like a county line or property line, so this decision could impact what lists the animal is or isn’t included on
  2. The habitat I’m in and the habitat I’m photographing are substantially different

I know in birding, there are some pretty rigid rules about this- for example, I’ve observed Snowy Owls while I was in my home county, but the owls were 100 yards away over the county line, so they don’t “count” for my county list. But for most “yard listers”, they include any bird they can see from their yard, whether or not it actually soars over their air space.

Has anyone else given this any thought and come up with a guideline? Or is this another one in the “do whatever you want” category?

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This is what ends up happening, for sure. There is no requirement or standard. The argument being that because “An observation records an encounter […]”, and you are part of that encounter, the location can be anywhere between the two individuals.

Personally I think it makes way more sense to put the pin where the organism is, when you can/have time (#2).

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I always do option 2: place the pin where the organism is. For mobile organisms like birds, I don’t think it’s as big a deal outside the edge cases you mentioned, eg observation made right along a geopolitical boundary. But for immobile things like plants, putting the pin where the organism was makes it much easier for future observers/researchers/etc to potentially relocate it if needed. For example, I have observations of lithophytic plants growing on cliff faces, for which I took the photos standing on the other side of a gorge or gully, and observations of plants on a river bank taken from the opposite bank. In these cases, knowing which side of a gorge/river the plant was growing on is pretty important for someone who may want to eg collect a specimen, as it may not be possible to cross the gorge/river at that point, and so you need to be on the correct side to start with.

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I also generally try to put the pin where the organism is if it was a significant distance away from me as it makes more sense to me. That said, I expect that coordinates on iNat will be a mix of locations for the organism and the observer. Given that most coords on iNat come from a device (camera, phone, GPS), I would guess most coordinates represent the observer’s location rather than the organism’s (though many times these are essentially the same of course).

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I think that option 2 is better, but it isn’t realistic to expect most observations to be marked that way. In my case, I record my position with GPS and then use the track to geotag the pictures, so I am using option 1. Changing the location to where the animal actually was would be time consuming at best and impossible at worst (I don’t always remember), and in most cases the difference is not more than a few meters anyway (more than 50 in very rare cases). I imagine this would be even worse for audio-only observations, where pinpointing where the animal was might be impossible.

I think this is a limitation that the researchers working with iNat data for big organisms should take into account

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I have never found this to be a debate because the data point is supposed to represent the organism, not you. You should try your best to move the point to where it was, if observing something at long range. Granted, you probably aren’t observing something that’s more than a hundred or few hundred feet away. Most data points don’t start becoming hazy until they are more than a mile off, so it isn’t the end of the world.

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I’ve always done 2 because of the reasons already listed. If you are say on the border of a county line(I frequently am), or even state lines, and the species you are observing is in the opposite county/state from you, it would be incorrect to put the point down for your location because that would give that county a new record of a species that it wasn’t actually observed in.

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Observation locations don’t follow strict rules, so it’s incumbent on users of the iNaturalist data to understand this.

My favorite example is this pair of collection projects - one for land, one for water. I’ve combined them into a simple umbrella project:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/lake-greenwood-sp-boundary-waters

This suggests to me that they don’t understand how this works if they really expected that only organisms on the water would show up in the boundary water project and vice versa.

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Just wanted to point out that this discussion holds for recorded sounds as well, with the complication that often we can’t tell where the sound producer is!

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When I photograph I pin to subject.
Usually I will pin my location with sound only recording, not knowing subject location.

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This is to me the least important reason. I know that in some areas, people are really invested into “county records”, but from the point of view of biology, the made-up lines on the ground really have no importance. For this purpose, I would see much more important if the observation occurred for example across very different habitats or something like that, where relevant information is actually lost, but not just administrative lines.

That having said, the chances of me ever correcting a location like that are essentially zero ever since we started systematically geotagging everything. I often don’t even correct for the situations where the phone is not on me while observing - typically when snorkeling the logged location might be a kilometer away. The convenience of geotagging allows me to process much more observations efficiently so that some inaccuracy is the price worth paying for that.

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I have given some thought to this topic in the past. I think 2 is probably the method which provides the most valuable data. Having said that, most of my photos are taken with an iPhone which automatically records my location and I generally just go with that. I don’t believe there would normally be a lot of benefit in recording the precise location of a bird in a tree that I snapped from 40 metres away. If it was a large tree or animal that was visible on a distant hilltop, yes I would try and provide a more precise location.

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Good options, I often struggle with the same issue, it can be obvious from the photo that the GPS pin doesn’t match where a far-off plant actually is, so in that case I’ll often move the pin to where it is and make a note that I’ve moved the GPS to be more in line with where the organism actually is.

It’d be nice if the metadata could include direction the camera is facing so this kind of information could be reconstructed to some degree later, but that’s why it’s important to note when the GPS has been moved from the location of the photograph to better represent the actual location since this would become misleading otherwise in the future.

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I’m in the same situation, as I’m sure are a great many users who geotag their images automatically from a GPS track. I very rarely post observations of particularly mobile animals such as birds or large mammals, most of my observations are of plants and arthropods, but I can see that it might be a problem if, for example, I photographed an aquatic plant from the bank of a river or lake. I’m sure though that, as @antonva says, researchers regularly using iNat data will be aware of this and will take it into account.

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I’ve always operated under the thinking that the goal of iNaturalist is to document the actual locations of the taxa being cataloged. This is not an “effort-based” database (such as eBird), which would skew towards caring about where the human observer is located.

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I think #2 makes the most sense, but I mainly photograph fungi, plants, and found feathers, so I rarely have to worry about it. :grinning_face:

I did once move the location of a deer across the street because it was coming up inside someone’s house (phone’s GPS location in my photo).

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I agree with you entirely. Option 2 is clearly better from an abstract data quality standpoint, but it is entirely impractical, and might even make the actual data quality worse, for me to try to remember exactly where each bird actually was and move the points provided by the GPS in my camera. Anyone using iNat data who needs points to be accurate to within a few meters would have to be extremely careful which data they included.

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I don’t think people are using iNat data down the meter generally, but the distance between an observer and the organism can definitely make a difference in terms of municipality/state/country at times.

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I typically record plants, and so I always aim to record the location of the plant. The plant doesn’t move, and part of my entire reason for recording the plant is to acknowledge the existence of that particular plant in that particular location. If someone wants to collect seed from it, then they need as accurate a record as possible of its location. I’ve even seen past discussions about strangely angled trees, and where the location should be set to, with my opinion being to the point at which it is rooted to the ground!

Accurate location is very important for plants, whether it be to refind a propagation source in the future, or to revisit a pest plant for destruction or follow-up control.

For animals I can see the location as being much less important, particularly for larger animals like birds or grazing mammals, or other such creatures. They move around a lot over quite a large area, so recording that an owl is on the road edge or 100 metres away in a paddock is really much of a muchness to me.

Smaller creatures, like an insect that is obligate to a very specific plant, should probably have much more accurate locations.

When I do sound recordings I tend to give a pretty large accuracy, that aligns more with option 3 presented in the opening post. I don’t know the exact location, but I know (or at least highly suspect) it’s within the range I’ve offered.

I would argue this is certainly the case for larger animals, as I stated above. For plants though, having an accurate record of a plant in a specific location can lend a lot of credence to grant applications for funding to protect that plant. If it’s contained in a particular area, along with a number of other important plant species, then being able to show that can mean justification for why you want grant money to put a fence around that location.

As noted above, often us plant folk will be using iNat data down to the metre. Very important for being able to return to a very specific plant for propagation collection, or to exterminate a pest plant that has been registered by someone.

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Pin where the subject is. For example, what if there are multiple observers? Ideally, everyone is pinning where the subject is since it’s the same subject that’s being observed. That way, it’s clear that multiple observers are recording observations of the same subject.

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