(Note: This quote is not from jonhakim; it is from a posting elsewhere that jonhakim is quoting here.)
I wonder if there is more evidence of cause and effect than what this person said here. Even if this account is literally true (one person uploaded one public observation, and later that location became busy with people, all of whom were looking for salamanders), there’s not necessarily a correlation there. Did any of the people that were there looking for salamanders say that they came to this particular location because they saw an observation of an arboreal salamander on iNaturalist there?
I do sympathize with the argument that public locations for even non-listed herps can be problematic, but it would be much more convincing if there were some less anecdotal evidence.
It is a situation where non-anecdotal evidence is very difficult. No one is recording population pressure on these various populations in a systematic way. And it would be very difficult to track how every person ended up on a site, especially second-degree effects.
I’ll throw out a very loosely supporting aside - a couple times a year from 2008 to 2012 I was going into quite accessible canyons in the San Gabriels, including I believe the canyon in question in that comment, and looking for Arboreal Salamanders and other species. I never, ever, ever, ever saw anyone doing the same thing as me. If he’s really seeing people flipping for salamanders every time he goes out in that canyon, that definitely suggests something unusual happening there.
For me, this “boy scout” thing is an opportunity to reach out and educate a group… if you see a bunch of people from one organisation doing something in a negatively impactful way, then engaging with that community group and educating them as to what is less impactful is far better than just removing their opportunity to engage with nature. We want MORE scout groups out there turning rocks, but putting them back. Doing it as groups of 4 per rock instead of one each, mindful not to handle them… making the intrusion on them as minimal as they can. Those encounters will be lasting impressions that foster a value and respect for the environment that could potentially manifest in habitats destined for development being campaigned to be saved… These sort of hypotheticals are just as valid as any that might suggest iNat is promoting any negative behaviour.
I’m not discounting the possibility of it happening or not happening that way, I’m just saying that this “potential problem” needs to be investigated for cause and effect before any efforts to mitigate it are implemented. Anecdotal evidence is a reason to investigate further, not a reason to make changes. I think the potential for the problem has been raised with staff and they would take it seriously enough to do that investigation before making impactful changes on iNat
But obscuring an iNaturalist record doesn’t remove anyone’s opportunity to engage with nature at all. All the boy scouts can search for salamanders to their hearts’ content in any canyon in the San Gabriels. If the record is obscured it will still show them all the same stuff about the salamander, it still holds all the same educational value. The only thing that will be different is concentrating everyone’s attention on one particular spot rather than having salamander hunters dispersed across the mountains.
And if the deciding factor is that the boy scouts only want to “get this salamander for ourselves that someone guaranteed we’d find right here” rather than “do our best to search for salamanders”, then that does raise some potentially problematic incentives that the locations could be creating. What is the positive difference between searching based off of an exact record and searching based off an obscured record? Is it just the impression (potentially inaccurate) that “we’re guaranteed something here” or “this is the easiest way possible” or that “what’s most important is that we score something however we do it”?
And education is great, I’ve spent thousands of hours on the conservation education projects I assist in four different countries. For all we know the guy in question did a great job of educating those groups when he saw them, we can’t fault him for that. I hope he did.
One thing that would help, at least as a partial or interim solution, is to remove the links at the bottom of observation pages in the case of all obscured observations. These make it too easy (one click) to see the location of other observations made on the same day.
Below is an image showing the links I mean. We could keep “observations of relatives” but the others are problematic.
Similarly, it would be useful to disable the forward/back arrows on obscured observations. Basically, make it harder for people to arrive at the nearest observation in time in the case of obscured observations. This functionality should be retained only for the original observer and anyone who has been trusted with obscured coordinates.
It seems the iNaturalist team is coming up with something even better, but this seems like something that could be implemented immediately and would have an effect.
