Having just found out how to view which of my observations do and don’t have location accuracy recorded, I’m very confused and frustrated that seemingly almost half of my observations do not have their accuracy recorded. I manually input/edit the accuracy on every single one of my sightings so I am not sure how they have disappeared.
It’s not exactly an enormous loss that an individual observation does not have the accuracy recorded but it’s very concerning that the information seems to have simply vanished from so many sightings. Can anyone offer some insights as to what might have happened??
Looking at my observations which do have location accuracy recorded, there does not seem to be much of a pattern in which observations have been affected. The only noticeable thing is that only 6 (out of 2000+) of my sightings uploaded this year have had their accuracy vanish - was something changed in how the data is stored or something? My upload/input method hasn’t changed at all so I am clutching at straws a bit trying to work it out.
I will try to re-add it to the sightings from which it is missing but I don’t want to edit 2500 observations if it is just going to happen again!
i’ve noticed that if you manually input coordinates / positional accuracy on the observation edit screen and immediately click save, it doesn’t always keep the information. on that screen, you have to move to a different input box before you click save, i think… or something like that. whatever that process is, i always double-check after saving to make sure coordinates and positional accuracy have been saved appropriately.
if you input that information on the upload screen, generally i encounter fewer unexpected issues there. the only thing that sometimes trips me up is that if i’m editing multiple observations at once, i need to make sure to begin the edits using the left pane, not the observation cards.
EDIT: i just tried messing around with the observation edit screen, and i can’t reproduce the problem that i’ve seen in the past. so it’s possible that the problem has been fixed, although data affected in the past will still be bad.
Are you certain the accuracy was recorded in the first place, or do you know that the observations had an accuracy value after they were submitted and eventually lost that value?
I’m certain that at least some of them had accuracy recorded at some point because I have edited the observations from around my house a couple of times and double-checked that they’d saved. I’m not sure how long ago that was though and I don’t know about the other observations
I think that you might be right: typing in is not adequate: you either need to select a value (click) or move to another field.
Surely though, you can easily check this in the format that you are uploading your data?
I have about 4000 observations without a location accuracy out of 24000 observations. I added the location accuracies manually using a laptop and the inat website. I dont understand how i managed to create so many observations without location accuracies !
Ive checked a few of the problematic observations and find that when I go to edit the map for an observation and click on the pin, then the observation accuracy circle appears and looks quite correct, Most of my observations are in one of my four backyards and the accuracy circles that appear in the edit map are about the width of my yards, which is what i would normally add as an accuracy. This suggest to me that at some stage i did add an accuracy ( perhaps 15 m radius) and it has ‘disappeared’ from the final map but appears in the map during editing. Here are my observations with missing location accuracies. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&subview=table&user_id=botswanabugs&verifiable=any&acc=false
Are you zooming in before you click on the pin? I just tested and if I go to an obs without any accuracy data, clicking on the pin creates a circle that’s related to my zoom level. If it’s zoomed out fully the accuracy circle has a radius of 100k m:
I’m not having any problem saving the location accuracy when I edit an observation, either when I enter it manually as a number or use the map. However, there was a bug that had been fixed that I think was the cause of this problem in the past: https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/issues/3301
thanks @tiwane youre right. The accuracy circle in the edit map has nothing to do with one that is now missing. I had another missing accuracy on dec 26 21 ( though it is now corrected. Im using a laptop and inat website.However during the last week internet has been continuously going on and off rapidly. Does internet going on off on in middle of an upload cause problems? Ive never seen internet here so bad as during the the last week, here.
@tiwane I think those of us with large numbers of missing location accuracy circles need very clear, simple, easy instructions for export of the problem observations to a spreadsheet, then how to edit the spreadsheet and then use the spreadsheet to make a bulk upload with the correct accuracy info. How many bad obsevations can be exported at a time and how many can be bulk uploaded after correction. If there are 4000 lacking observations, how many can be processed at a time assuming internet here in Botswana is poor and keeps going on and off ! I and perhaps others have no experience of export and bulk upload. Ive tried folowing instruction from other from others but have so far failed to export, Is 4000 observations too many in one go ? Thanks so much for helping ! Most of my observations have been made within a garden so I think it would be fair to make an accuracy of 10 or 15 m for all of them in a bulk upload.
That’s not possible, the CSV uploader is only for creating new observations. You’ll want to use the Batch Edit functionality at https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/botswanabugs Use the search to find batches of observations that should all have the same accuracy radius. Click Batch Edit, select those obserations, click Edit Selected. Then use the batch editor to add the same accuracy radius to all observations in that batch.
someone wrote up a tutorial covering what i think you’re wanting to do, though i think i would do steps 2 & 3 differently. (i’m sort of indifferent to accuracy values myself – so i’ve never actually tried doing this whole process myself – but it looks like it’ll reasonably do what it claims to do.)
as far as why you might have “missing” accuracy values, you might want to look at the link i referenced in an earlier post in this thread, and see if that sounds similar to your process.
For what it’s worth, I never worked out what caused my problem or how to fix it. I just had to go through them all manually and fix them up. I don’t think it has happened to me since but I haven’t really checked.
Not sure if this is related or not, but in the API none of my observations show the accuracy.
They are reported like Points, but in the web interface they are circles with a certain radius (the one I drew when I uploaded them):
