Whilst I realise some people want to keep location details to a minimum, some records are coming through to iRecord, with just a 10km or even a 100km grid ref, which for mapping / record purposes, is useless. These records (for Terrestrial Hets at least!) are not being accepted. Is there a way please to allow the system to either give a minimum of a 2km grid ref for iRecord, or not be transmitted at all?
Thanks!
Seems like that could be handled on either the iNat or iRecord side.
Shouldn’t be difficult on either end to set up a pre-filter. I’d think that it would make more sense for that to be on the data receiving side rather than the data export side though.
Thank you! I’ll ask the question on iRecord!
The transmission (import) is on the iRecord side.
iNaturalist has nothing to do with the design of the import, it just provides API access as it does to any member of the public as far as I understand. The iRecord developers can make it as bespoke as they like and filter out low accuracy observations if preferred.
But ideally there would be some sort of trust system in place. At the moment as users within iNaturalist we have the option to trust other users and projects with obscured coordinates, but I don´t believe there is anything which would allow us to trust iRecord.
However, on the iNat help page, it does say
restricted location information can be shared with others: … If you join via or affiliate with an iNaturalist Network Node (e.g. iNaturalist Australia)"
As such, I wonder if iRecord are able to access obscured coordinates for users like myself who are iNat UK affiliated. Perhaps the problem is the affiliation still wouldn’t give iNat UK the right to pass that information on to iRecord.
Note also that as users we don´t have precise control over the amount of obscuration if we use the presets. We only have three settings : Open, Obscured or Private. On the help page, these are described as follows :
Obscured: For obscured observations, the latitude and longitude are moved to private latitude and private longitude fields which are not publicly visible. The public positional accuracy is increased to the diagonal of a 0.2 x 0.2 degree cell (~500km2 at the equator or about the same size as the Isle of Man). Latitude and longitude are replaced with a random point within this cell.
Private: No geographic information is shared publicly.
Thank you for your comprehensive reply! I have to admit to knowing very little about how iNaturalist works… It’s just frustrating that some potentially interesting records are rendered useless with the lack of location info. I’ll now perhaps be able to better formulate my question on iRecord!
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