Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.
Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website
App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):
Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Chrome
Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):
Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):
I uploaded an observation via Seek that Seek classified as Rhamnus Alnifolia which is automatically obscured in my area. It was then corrected to Rhamnus Cathartica by a community member and was unobscured. When it was unobscured the location changed to a place about 8-10 miles south of where I observed it. I went back in and manually changed it back to where I observed it so it is now displaying the correct location but it was really odd.
when did you correct the location? do you have any screenshots of your observation from when the location was misplaced? or can you reiaibly reproduce the issue? without screenshots, reliable steps to reproduce, or something like that, it’s hard to even guess at what might be going on, and without a place to start, it could be really difficult to troubleshoot such an issue.
your observation has all rights reserved. so there’s no chance that your data would have been replicated to GBIF or the AWS Open Dataset as an alternative way to get the old data. that means that without a screenshot, iNat staff are probably the only once who have any chance at this point of seeing the error condition, either via a backup of the data or trying to dig trough log files to look for changes.
when observations are obscured, their locations appear to be shifted to a different location on the map. when unobscured, the true location should be represented on the map correctly again.
I had someone report a similar problem after I corrected their observation posted as Viola canadensis (automatically obscured in the Chicago Region). After moving the community ID to Viola striata, which also has a status but is not automatically obscured, the observation showed as being in Lake Michigan. The observation is two years old, from Berrien County, Michigan.
I just tried this - made an obs of an auto-obscured taxon in Seek, posted to iNat, then changed my ID so that it was no longer of an auto-obscured taxon - and the unobscured location looked fine. Is this basically what happened?
I looked in our backup from last week and I do see that the observation’s unobscured public location is well south of its current location.
that’s interesting. i wonder if the original location recorded was just wrong to begin with, and it wasn’t noticed until the observation was unobscured?
Do you still have the photo on your device’s library/gallery? If so, does the photo have any location data? Did you take the photo with Seek, or your phone’s camera app?
Yes it does I will say the location data on the photo appears to be off from where I actually took it but no where near as dramatically as was showing up after it was unobscured.
I took the photo with Seek and the GPS data connected to that would be from what seek got which I have found Seek is always slightly inaccurate (although not wildly so just typically like across the street like this one is)
