I guess this is drifting into a different topic: the risk of plant poaching in the southeastern USA. It’s an interesting and valuable topic, but it’s different from “Is iNat actually helping scientists?”
I think they are related topics. People want to make identifications to help scientists, but they don’t want the information to help poachers. New users might not know what protections iNat has in place to protect sensitive species.
First let me say welcome to the Forum, and so sorry if any of the responses felt less than welcoming.
For what it is worth, I think of iNaturalist as a sort of delicately balanced object, where the observers often seem to be balanced by the identifiers, the users by the volunteers (curators / moderators) and staff, and the rank amateurs (like me!) by those with some training and those again by professional scientists. Sometimes roles overlap; some observers are also identifiers and many curators are also prolific users, etc.
All of these people are trying, sometimes more politely than at other times, to have iNaturalist meet their own needs while at the same time allowing and sometimes questioning if the others are having their needs met, which is why there are so many threads along the lines of this one.
One thing though I think all parties agree on is that poachers and wildlife traffickers have no place on iNaturalist. The mechanisms for how to best effect that, though, while still balancing the needs of all the parties who do have a role here, is sometimes not fully agreed on, so there are many threads about the obscuration ways. Here is a recent one that touches on plants not far geographically from you.
Again, welcome to the forum. Happy iNatting!
Yes iNaturalist is helping scientists greatly in my area in the Mojave Desert. I do a lot of fieldwork and have observed odd scorpions, rare plants, even fireflies where they are not supposed to be. Scientists, researchers, experts, or agency biologists have found these observations through iNat and have messaged me, and we have collaborated on investigating these observations further. Often I have taken them into the field to show them locations. Some observations may be of undescribed taxa new to science, or new locations of taxa. Sometimes the bulldozers or groundwater pumpers are more of an eminent threat than any potential poachers. iNat is a great tool for conservation biology.
For species that are likely to be poached, use the geoprivacy setting “obscured.” That puts the dot in a random location in the latilong block that contains the observation. That block is about 14 x 14 miles at the equator, smaller northward. You’ll see a dot for your own observations, but don’t worry, they’re randomized for us.
If that doesn’t seem like enough protection, you can use “private” but if you do, nobody but you will even know what continent it’s on. You can add a comment about that. Obviously, if you hide one observation you should hide the others at that place that data, maybe more of them, so they won’t lead people to the protected plant.
Despite all this protection, people can work around the protections if they have the necessary computer skill. If you think the risk is very high, you may prefer not to post it on iNaturalist.
Yes, iNat is helping. Even if it isn’t directly hosting them. There was a recent (I don’t know where the article is right now) discovery of some “fireflies” near Santa Fe NM, that populated after a grazing field was either used again or left fallow. When I talked with others here some of them had heard about it because they had recently been “reconnected” with nature through inat. While not a direct “helping scientists” it is helping to create a general awareness of ecology and nature.
I have run into this, and it is why in general I obscure my observations. I also thought about this with some of the “not commonly observed on inaturalist” things I’ve observed. Typically I’ve been leaning towards tiny arthropods and lichens and I suspect there aren’t many people looking to poach those. I occasionally find something that is protected/threatened/endangered. I also have suspicions that some of my obs that aren’t ID’d to species level yet are a lot more uncommon than their parent taxa. I find obscuring them gives me the piece of mind.
I have looked at my obscured observations from a logged out account and watched how far out the map puts it sometimes and I am confident that it would pose a challenge to anyone who wanted to go find the location.
That’s why I insist every time I’m posting about this, that we need more than just one ‘fit for all’ obscure option.
You missed this part obviously:
The current area is fine for many use cases and is the same for automatically obscured rare/endangered species, but an additional smaller area would help to prevent users to ‘fudge’ the location.
Agree to disagree, then! To me it makes no sense to say one thing on one interface, and something else in another.