it would more be convenient for me if the location “range” circle was bigger since i can never remember exactly what was where, but i suppose this has been optimised for “citizen science” data collection. doesn’t the narrow range just incentivise inaccurate location data though? i know i’m very lazy when it comes to this sort of thing for one
when you upload an observation, you can edit the accuracy circle to be however small or large you want it to be; it is not fixed
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yes, but what i’m saying is i bet people don’t, so you’d get better data with a bigger default circle size
I do.
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and i admire your conscientiousness. ok, maybe i can’t extrapolate myself as representative
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If you don’t assign an accuracy, then under “Details” it will say “Accuracy: Not recorded”
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Do you upload with the website or an app? I use the website, and I enter the precision along with the coordinates.
The radius must be at least 1. I once observed a spider whose location I know within a decimeter (it was right on top of one of my traverse nails), but when I entered 0.1 or 0.2, the site said “not recorded”.
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probably just confused myself with the way the default works with zoom - new user issues. Goes sub 1m in the accuracy input field, dont know if it records i already emptied my working image folder!
Something to keep in mind - with larger accuracy circles, it becomes increasingly likely that your observations won’t be included in projects (the accuracy circle breaks the bounding box). Mostly an issue with small places or when an observation is near the edge.
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This may have to do with your camera, if your photos have geolocation. Any picture taken with my phone with geolocation shows an accuracy of 5m (and I correct both the dropped pin and accuracy on upload) but for pictures without geolocation, the accuracy circle’s size depends on the zoom I have on the map when I drop the pin. The more zoomed in, the smaller the radius.
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The “default” circle size on iNaturalist is zero (blank, none). That field is only populated if it is supplied in the photo metadata (or by an app) at upload, or is manually set by the user. Changing the zoom before dropping a pin for the location may be one such manual method (I don’t set my locations that way - I always have GPS locations instead), but it is still entirely under the control of the observer.
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How do you get to somewhere that has zoom? If I’m uploading an observation, I get a rectangular area inside the window. Inside the rectangular area there’s the photo; under that are four fields: name of the species, time, location, and notes. If I click on location, a popup appears in the window, and almost always I enter the latitude and longitude or pick one from the preset list at the top. There is a map, but I’ve used it only once, to enter the location of an observation near the doctor’s office, when I hadn’t brought my GPS system.
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i enter it manually on the map. i think my old laptop might be the prob, i should probably just use the app, heh
I’m finding this curious because it doesn’t match what I’ve experienced. I use whatever location and accuracy my phone gives except when it’s clearly wrong, but recently that’s been happening more and more of the time (for some batch uploads, I reckon I’ve been needing to correct around 50% of locations, with some being up to 100km away - very, very frustrating). As a result, I’ve had to manually alter a lot of locations, and the circle size when I change the location neither defaults to zero nor stays what it was initially. As @Naelin said, it depends on the zoom level of the map - I haven’t tried to work out whether it’s the same number of pixels across regardless of zoom level or what, but it’s definitely smaller the further you’re zoomed in. I then adjust the radius as necessary to allow for my uncertainty about the location.
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the default being referred to in that quote is when you upload a record without any spatial information, eg a photo taken with a DSLR camera that doesn’t have geotagging, or photos that have been geotagged using certain programs vs the location services of mobile phones which apply a non-zero value to coordinates
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From my experience iPhones automatically include a precision value that gets imported into the map, but Android phones don’t. I haven’t used many cameras that automatically geotag photos so I don’t know if they do, but yeah if you used software to geotag them with a GPS track file then they won’t have the precision.
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Meaning that the default if there’s no location chosen is to have no circle around the missing location? I mean, I guess that makes sense, but it seems fairly meaningless. Thanks for clarifying, though. :-)
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sorry, I didn’t explain that well
If you take a photo and it does not have spatial data automatically embedded (and by that I mean like what happens when eg taking a photo with an iPhone with location services turned on, it will return coordinates and an accuracy value), and you manually enter the coordinates, the default accuracy will be blank/zero, unless you change it manually as well. Similarly, there are some geotagging softwares that, although they will geotag your photos with coordinates, will not embed an accuracy value in them, and so uploading those photos will similarly result in blank accuracy values as the default, even though they came with coordinates
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So entering coordinates manually as distinct from putting a pin on the map? Okay, that makes more sense - I understand now. Thanks.
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If you haven’t already tried this, I suggest using the phone app in Airplane Mode, with a pure GPS app of some kind also running in the background (to keep the phone’s GPS location refreshed). Then come out of Airplane Mode later when you are ready to edit names and upload the accumulated observations. (Don’t try to further edit the locations before uploading, or you may lose the original GPS coordinates and precision.) I’ve always gotten accurate locations with precisions <10m this way, though heavy forest cover or tall buildings nearby may degrade this.
Correct, once a non-zero circle size has been set (either by manual mapping or from photo/app data), it will not default back to zero, but may change depending on how you further edit the location. You can always type in your own circle size if you don’t believe the current value represents the true accuracy of the coordinates.
I always get a precision value when using the Android app. It may have to do with the fact that I always use the in-app camera, instead of pulling photos from the gallery. Photos saved to the gallery may not include precision values - I’ve never checked. (Mostly I use a DSLR and separate GPS unit, and upload via the website.)
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