Mass conservation status imports: Please do not auto-obscure non-threatened taxa that are not being targeted by people

@teellbee, I don’t think anyone meant anything hurtful here. By mftasp saying “I don’t care”, I read that as in the context of this particular, narrow topic of discussion of mass-imported IUCN statuses it is not relevant. (I also believe everyone participating in this discussion does care deeply about effectively reducing animal persecution or harm.)

All: please do bring your concerns about the geoprivacy settings for specific species by flagging the taxon on iNaturalist.

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Thanks @bouteloua, you are right, and thank you for making the topic title clearer. Of course I actually do care about coyotes and Burmese pythons, and threatened species in general, but this topic is about the mass-obscuration of non-threatened taxa by automated import, behind the scenes, at a global lavel. It is not about individual, curator-controlled corner cases and iconic taxa. @teellbee evidently I wasn’t communicating this clearly enough, sorry if I came across as blunt.

I am trying to make a case that the auto-obscuration of non-threatened taxa should not be the default position when carrying out external imports such as from IUCN, and get a feel for whether I’m the only one who does, before I open a feature request as suggested by @jdmore.

The alternative is individual curation of the affected taxa by site curators, as I did for all the affected plant taxa in my region. Now, I live in an island with a fairly small flora, not many of which have been assessed by IUCN, so I was able to systematically hand-curate every affected taxon (27). How do the rest of you who might have to deal with a potentially much larger number of taxa feel about it?

My opinion is that this should be a site-wide policy and not be auto-obscured in the first place.

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And, I’m sorry I stepped out of your bounds for your topic.

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and for what its worth i totally agree with you on the topic of coyote ‘hunting’

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We have had exactly the same issue in southern Africa, where the automated IUCN conservation status updates, overrode 3 years worth of curation.
We have provided iNaturalist with a list of species that need to be removed from obscuration, and a list that needs to be obscured, but it is taking months for these to be incorporated into iNaturalist (provided 6 October). Meantime, the obscured data is hindering identification.

Hopefully, iNaturalist will soon have a tool for national curators to update these statuses, or at least not to have the statuses revoked.

Another issue though is that of taxonomy. So Giraffe is VU by IUCN and thus obscured, but OPEN for southern Africa. But the South African Giraffe - is VU but “Open” for southern Africa, and one of two subspecies in southern Africa (the Angolan Girfaffe is also VU but “Open” for southern Africa). But the data for subsp. giraffa, are still obscured because of inheritance from the species - as explained here:

Why the Coordinates Are Obscured

“* Taxon is threatened, coordinates obscured by default: One of the taxa suggested in the identifications, or one of the taxa that contain any of these taxa, is known to be rare and/or threatened, so the location of this observation has been obscured.”

Clearly, we need to have this process streamlined, esp. seen that Red List status is supposed to be reviewed every 5 years (although hopefully only a small fraction of species will change status). But for countries with large biota, this is quite a challenge.

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Scott initially said that southern Africa would be able to override global statuses. But the actual commit to allow overrides was only for continent-, country-, and state-level places, not regions.
We can ask @loarie if that was an oversight or intentional?

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@jdmore linked to my posts on the related topic about IUCN updates: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/updating-iucn-red-list-conservation-statuses/25712/40

@tonyrebelo @jwidness this might help, it has an example that @loarie set out for how to specify that the taxon should be unobscured.

I have used that example through my curation, but I’d prefer to see a consistent rule. My first priority is to address NT species, since they are not threatened.

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I don’t think your link is related to the giraffe problem. G. camelopardalis has been set to open in southern Africa since last year and G. camelopardalis giraffa has been set to open globally since 2018.

There are two problems here: one I mentioned above, which is that the region southern Africa can’t currently override global statuses even though it seems like it was supposed to be able to do that. The other is that finer taxa automatically inherit status/geoprivacy from coarser taxa even if they have their own status set.

So G. c. giraffa looks like this currently:

The first status is one set on the subspecies G. c. giraffa and should probably get priority (but doesn’t). That is, there is no observation that uses the open geoprivacy of G. c. giraffa.

The other two VU statuses are both inherited from C. camelopardalis. The global one is currently not letting the southern Africa one through, but (as an example), if it were set to open in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, etc., those would override the global status because country-level statuses can override global statuses.

The end result is that even if all IDs on an obs are for G. c. giraffa and it’s in southern Africa, it’s still being obscured.

That is OK for one or two cases, but when there are hundreds or thousands it is not feasible. We need a streamlined tool for community curators to be able to fix these in bulk.

Just look at what the poor Canadians have to go through (but I suspect that this is their own doing) - https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/curator+guide#geoprivacy but Canada has far fewer species than the Cape, let alone southern Africa.
(flora on INat currently: 8,628 Canada, 11,983 Cape Flora, 15,638 Australia, 18,387 South Africa & BUT: threatened flora: 2,749 Canada, 1,200 Australia, 936 South Africa, 662* Cape Flora) [*the actual figure is 1,947, but the Red List stati are not yet uploaded (waiting), and many species are not yet on iNaturalist - rare, remote or extinct]

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