I have set the establishment means for Pistacia vera for the places “Italy” as “introduced” but the three observations still have the position obscured.
I think that a species, although endangered in its area of origin, should not have the position obscured where it has been introduced by humans. Moreover, Pistacia vera has turned out to be reported in error for Italy in our last checklist: https://dryades.units.it/floritaly/index.php?procedure=taxon_page&tipo=all&id=3033
So, it would be important to have the possibility to see the exact position of the observations made so far.
I think the obscuration is global as long as it’s of that conservation status, regardless of whether it’s observed in an area it is not native to.
It’s also possible that the individual user may have obscured their observation location, in which case that is their decision and has nothing to do with the conservation status of the species observed.
marking a species as introduced has no effect on whether it’s obscured or not, the two are different fields. In order to unobscure the three Italian records, you need to add an extra status with open locations specifically for Italy, and it will override the global status. Just copy what I’ve already done for this species for Australia:
Is that the preferred approach? What I’ve done before is just changed the geography from global to instead encompass only the species native range, such as a continent or perhaps single country which contains it. That way, most of the introduced observations will be unobscured rather than having to add an introduced status to multiple locales. Curious to the pros and cons of each approach.
I don’t know if it’s the broadly preferred approach, but it’s my personal preferred approach. There are sometimes niche cases where someone may want to keep records obscured outside of the native range, so this way just ensures the subset that is definitely desired to be unobscured is specifically targeted.
It probably depends on whether the species is broadly distributed or not in its native range.
If it has a small, well-known native range, then it makes sense to use @kevinfaccenda 's approach as it is easy to implement.
If it has a larger or poorly defined range that is difficult to encompass with one or a couple of places, then I would use @thebeachcomber 's approach so that the default geoprivacy is obscured (assuming that’s warranted) even if it pops up somewhere it hasn’t before.
I think this is probably just an efficiency/convenience-based choice overall, but I think it’s worth erring on the global approach (which maintains geoprivacy if new populations are discovered) and unobscuring in the invasive range. For species that are widely invasive though, a) it becomes a bigger pain to define all of those as open/introduced and b) less likely that the species requires obscuration if it is invasive in many areas of the world.
In either case, the best action would be to raise a flag for discussion on the specific taxon on iNat so that it can be addressed there.
