I manage several projects for a naturalist organization from another account. I have been the admin of these projects for several years. In previous years, we asked people who joined our projects (generally bioblitz-type projects) to obscure the location of their observations so that we don’t give away the location of our events to people outside of our organization. It is in the rules of our projects that members must obscure their observations to allow them to be included in the projects.
Our latest project/bioblitz ran from September 6th-8th in a specific area and covered three specific taxa. The project has 8 members who I know attended and who posted what should be qualifying photos in terms of taxa, location, and date, but none of these observations show up in the project. Not only are the locations of these observations obscured, but the dates they were made are also obscured so that they now all just say “September 2024.” Only one observation (not obscured) was showing up in the project (and I’ve asked the person who posted it to obscure it, as per the project rules).
The project already allows members to trust admins with hidden coordinates, so that should not be the problem, but I checked it by toggling this feature on and off and it doesn’t enable the observations to populate the project.
Expaning the date range of the project to the entire month of September does not enable the observations to populate the project, either.
What can I do beyond these things to enable the observations to appear in the project?
We’d probably need specific URLs, like project URL and some of the observations. If you don’t want to share those here you can email help@inaturalist.org and I can look into it.
This raises the general question about traditional and/or collection projects and obscured observations that perhaps @tiwane can address in this topic: Does the entirety of the (rectangular) obscured block for a single observation need to be within the geographic place for a project for the observation to be added? I know this is the case for observations with large circles of uncertainty.
Yeesh, I hope not, because the location where our observations were made is near water that is not part of the area included in the project (which stops at the water’s edge), but some of the obscured observations look like they’re in the lake.
Edit: I have tried to add a place that encompasses the lake, but the municipal boundaries of the region plus its share of the lake are a 1.9 MB KML file, and uploading only the lake portion of it generates errors (the place can’t be created for some reason). Aaargh! FWIW, I’m using the official municipal boundaries from the Province of Ontario [must use Safari; will not work in Firefox or Chrome], so that I’m not needlessly creating a place that other people won’t want to use.
We have this trouble with BioBlitz events on relatively small properties (200 acres, e.g.) when observations are obscured. Same thing can happen on bigger properties if the actual observation location is near the property boundary and the location is obscured. The observation location seems to be thrown outside of the place perimeter, so the observation is not included in the BioBlitz project. I never hit on a solution for the issue, other than not obscuring the location, which isn’t always possible because some of the property owners require obscure.
@gcwarbler I think you may remember another case we had where Black-capped Vireos or some other endangered or threatened or vulnerable species that were not included in a BioBlitz project because their location coordinates are automatically obscured. That was even though the actual coordinates were trusted to the project manager. Did I recall that accurately?