Is there any way to get more IDs on observations with private locations?

[jnstuart]

When I worked in a physical museum collection, curating vertebrate specimens, it was understood by all workers that the data associated with the specimen was as important as the specimen itself. A specimen without accurate and complete data, including location, was of little value. To me the same should apply to iNat records.

[neylon]

Yep: where, when, who collected it, and very importantly, who identified it. I get annoyed on GBIF when I see out of range specimen records with no photo and the identifier isn’t named.

[neylon]

That and due to the difficulty in identifying private observations, all it typically does is clog up the work-load of the already overloaded identifiers.

[alyshavio]

Oh, when I say SAR I’m referring to species at risk - not an infectious human disease.

[tiwane]

@neylon

That and due to the difficulty in identifying private observations, all it typically does is clog up the work-load of the already overloaded identifiers.

Is this actually a big issue? Of the currently ~184m verifiable observations on iNat , only ~760k of them - about 0.4% - have a geoprivacy setting of Private. I’ve come across very few in my 16 years on iNat. When I do, if I don’t feel like identifying them or reaching out to the observer about location info (eg county, state, or country), I just move past them.

@eliwild1

I like to keep my herp related observations either very obscured (which decreases location accuracy so i dont use it often / at all) or private with a location description in the caption.

If you want to set your observation’s geoprivacy to Private, that’s fine, but that will make it harder to find and harder to identify. You might consider not posting them to iNat at all and instead addingthem to https://www.naherp.com/ or a similar site.

[neylon]

@tiwane

@neylon

That and due to the difficulty in identifying private observations, all it typically does is clog up the work-load of the already overloaded identifiers.

Is this actually a big issue? Of the currently ~184m verifiable observations on iNat , only ~760k of them - about 0.4% - have a geoprivacy setting of Private. I’ve come across very few in my 16 years on iNat. When I do, if I don’t feel like identifying them or reaching out to the observer about location info (eg county, state, or country), I just move past them.

To give a somewhat unrelated anecdote: Last year there was a user that uploaded a lot of observations of specimens for a species that is very difficult to identify, and about a quarter of his observations were from the underside of the bee which are not identifiable (we later found out that he had accidently not combined his photos). Everyone ID’d the top and side pictures and I came on and had what looked like an endless train of underside of the bee photos which was all that was left. That did not fill me with warm and fuzzies for that observer.

On a similar note is Private locations. I finished the review for two different species and have high percentages for several others. Which means like the previous example, I do run into the observations that everyone else left. The home stretch whenever finishing a species is a slog. One of the reasons for that is Private locations.

I’m not saying either example happens constantly, but when it does happen, especially multiple times in a row, you do remember and it is annoying.

[zoology123]

760,000 observations is not a small number. It is a small percentage of a much larger number, but nobody should scoff at 760,000. Only 4 people on the entire site have Identified that many or more observations. Every year this number also increases as INaturalist is still growing. As of 5/3/24, 44,000 private observations have been added this year. How much bigger will this number grow in the coming years as the user base grows?

[sedgequeen]

Location is an important clue for figuring out what species an organism is. If you make an observation “Private” we don’t even know what continent the organism is on unless you comment. So unless the organism is really easy to ID unambiguously, I just move on past “Private” observations. Figuring them out would too often be a waste of my time. Consider using “obscure” instead if you want ID’s.