iNaturalist Updates for January 2022

[tiwane]

Here’s a list of iNat updates for January 2022. Thank you, @forum_moderators, for tracking these!

General

• Updated Community Guidelines with regard to machine-generated content
• Created App Owner role and App Owner Application for those who would like to make authenticated API calls
• Observations must now have been observed within the past 130 years
• Fix for Mushroom Observer import tool; set sunset date for this tool (June 2022)
• Curators can no longer resolve flags on their own content
• Fix for taxon/place subscriptions
• Continued work on API v2
• Many additional translations throughout the websites and apps - you can help

Website

• Bug fixes to Year In Review
• Minor fix to Google Location search on Explore
• Added “observation created using” icon/text to Identify, e.g. " iNaturalist Android App"
• Added new filters to the export page, such as geoprivacy, taxon_geoprivacy, not_in_place

Android

View all release notes

• Fix for bug related to project observation fields
• Crash fixes
• Fixed bug where changing device orientation during photography process would create a blank observation
• Fixed bug where activity feed where some updates showed description

iOS

• No updates this month

Seek

• Released January challenge

iNat Blog

• January 11th: A Conservationist in Ecuador Finds a Leafy Skinlichen!
• January 18th: A Young Naturalist Spots a Tree-Like Moss in Lithuania!
• January 21st: We’re hiring a Systems Architect to help iNaturalist scale!
• January 25th: A Wonderful Weevil in Indonesia

For even more bug fixes and updates, check out iNaturalist on github and see previous monthly updates.

[arboretum_amy]

@tiwane

Observations must now have been observed within the past 130 years

Better than the Thai date glitch!

[arboretum_amy]

@tiwane

Added “observation created using” icon/text to Identify, e.g. " iNaturalist Android App

I noticed that and it is great. Thank you.

[jakob]

@tiwane

• Observations must now have been observed within the past 130 years

Is there a thread leading to this rule, or could someone explain the background?

[tiwane]

It was an internal decision. But basically one reason the GBIF export was failing recently is that we have some really old observations and GBIF only accepts records from 1600 → present (or maybe 1601, I don’t know the exact cut-off)

So as part of fixing it, we decided to also limit observed-on dates to within the span of a human lifetime to emphasize that iNaturalist is not a data repository for any species occurrence data, like from museum collections, etc. It’s for people to share and discuss their personal observations of nature.