I work for a state wildlife agency. We would like to use data from iNaturalist to inform bag limits and conservation status for reptiles and amphibians. Ideally we would get exact locations and dates of research grade observations.
I notice there are two types of obscured locations.
Some species with certain conservation status are automatically obscured by iNaturalist, for example gila monsters.
Sometimes the user obscured the location in geoprivacy.
In the case of automatically obscured locations (with geoprivacy set to open), is there an automated way to get the actual coordinates through a data request? Or would I still have to contact every user individually to get the data?
When GBIF harvests data from inaturalist, are those data obscured?
I appreciate the discussion around this.
obscured by inaturalist but user geoprivacy set to open.
While this is true, it is also so impractical as to be pretty much unusable I would assume. It isn’t practical for a research group to contact thousands of people and actually get them all to opt-in. I think iNat’s lack of accessibility to researchers regarding status-obscured species (most of which don’t actually need to be obscured, since the system is pretty conservative applying to anything with a status by default unless revoked) is a real problem.
In this case, we have a real conservation use case that’s being hindered by there being no way for legitimate researchers to get access to the insanely powerful dataset of iNat.
iNaturalist puts user privacy, consent and licensing first, and so it isn’t designed at its core to be a freely available data platform as you desire it to be. There is no override for this that allows anyone to obtain unobscured locations for people’s observations from the get go.
As so, there is no answer to your question aside from asking the users manually for that information. Creating a project is one outlet, but people are not always likely to invest the time into committing to joining a new project and going through those hoops and hurdles, so asking directly is best.
However reptiles are kept under lock and key, you may struggle to find many people who will cooperate.
This is luckily not the decision of researchers which are happy to use data (and not possess the data), generated with time and heart by thousands of people, saving researchers time to do this on their own to have at least data for their projects.
Obscuration of sensitive species is never decided by observation owners. Both gheaton and the OP made it quite clear that it’s this subset of data they were talking about, rather than anything obscured via geoprivacy.
iNaturalist Network Members have access to obscured locations, as well as the email addresses of users who have chosen to affiliate with them. So there already are mechanisms in place that provide trusted institutions with either direct access to the relevant data or the facility to broadcast requests via batch emails instead of having to contact each user individually. Network Members can also make announcements that appear on every user’s dashboard, which provides another avenue for broad outreach.
According to the page linked above:
As of 2024, we are piloting a simplified approach to network partnerships.
A state wildlife agency seems like exactly the sort of organisation that this would be aimed at, but I couldn’t find any more details about it.
@tiwane Are you able to to shed any further light on this?
Thank you all for the discussion around this. I’m glad to hear there may be some progress on data sharing with different organizations and that there is mechanism in place with the iNaturalist Network to facilitate data sharing.
If users join a project and shares data with that project, I assume the project can access precise user obscured data but not data obscured by iNaturalist?
