If the Community ID and the observer’s ID match at the species level (or higher, depending on the DQA votes), the observation will be research grade. eg https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/89843718
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Not as easy as checking a box in the Filters panel, but you can manually add this parameter to your existing search URL. See this tutorial topic for the details.
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i did realize that a bunch of links to my work database from iNat are now kind of broken. I link my calendar page to some of our surveys and sometimes obscure a bunch of observations if they are on private property. Too bad, but i am not saying i don’t support these changes, just any option has downsides
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Ok, thanks. I’ve been using various custom filters via the URL, so I could add this one as well. One problem is that I would then be skipping observations from the observers who have already given project curators permission to see their obscured observations, so it’s not a perfect solution.
On second thought, maybe it is. Currently, there is no “cost” associated with obscuring one’s observations. I suspect there are at least some folks out there who believe that since obscuration doesn’t cost them anything, why take any chances? Perhaps our project should only work with folks who are willing to leave their geoprivacy open. Folks who find that the experts won’t look at their observations anymore can then decide for themselves whether they really need to obscure their observations.
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For whatever it’s worth (since observer preferences matter sometimes), in the rare cases where I’ve obscured the plants at a site to hide the location of one of them, I’ve intended to obscure the location, not the date and not my number of observations.
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If obscuring the date seems important, how about treating it like the obscuring of locations and fuzzing it out over 7 or 9 days? Make the date, June 28-July 6, not just “July.”
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I would prefer that over the current system.
note that this comment about my links breaking wasn’t entirely true. They still work for me just not for others.
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I don’t like the current system and I wouldn’t like a system that obscured the user name, either. I want as much open for us to see as possible. (I don’t go out and poach plants or anything.)
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For plants, an obviously high quality observation with like 7 pictures showing relevant features the username shouldn’t really matter, but obscuring the location still might, but I agree that if I’m looking at a single photo of something odd looking and see that its the user’s second observation its a good time saving clue that I should just ask if/assume its a non-local garden plant and move on. I don’t really have a strong opinion on whether an option like that would be net positive or negative.
It’s good as an option, but not for all obscured obs, and observer comments and ids should be anonymous too or it would force them not to communicate at all.
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Wow, long thread - I admit I haven’t read every single post above. I like the fact that iNat now obscures the date as well when location is obscured. I already did that “manually” by taking off the EXIF date from the photos and posting for a slightly off date but only for plants highly susceptible to poaching (e.g. ginseng).
Maybe making it an entire month is a bit broad and a week would do, but that depends on how active observers are. Not everyone has time to go out more than once a week, so that wouldn’t obscure much in that case. It would be nice if dates could have accuracy ranges, like there are accuracy circles for locations, but that’s probably another concept again. It also seems from scanning the comments that this impacts usefulness of data for some species (e.g. insects), while it probably does not matter much for others (e.g. trees).
Does obscuring prevent researchers from getting data? That depends on how responsive the observers are and how much time the researchers are willing to invest in following up. I’ve gotten asked and shared locations in several cases where the person asking was either doing research or a ranger/steward for the area. I’ve even met with park officials to guide them to location so they could get a precise GPS marker for their records. I understand there are a lot of other observers on iNat though who have just tried it out and since given up on it, or just simply don’t respond to messages. Some kind of mechanisms for researchers/park rangers etc. to demonstrate their “need to know” to iNat in order to unlock relevant obscured observations to them might be useful.
This raises the question though whether those obscured for privacy concerns should still be excluded from being made available, and how to tell those from the ones that people may have obscured due to the sensitive nature of the species rather than their own privacy. Maybe there could be a question/options when observers manually obscure an observation asking them for the reason. When I first started out with iNat, I used “private” for things with privacy concerns until I quickly figured out that this renders observations pretty much invisible to others. Anonymizing observations where privacy concerns are present might be an option, but I don’t think it should be used for observations obscured for sensitivity of species. I would hate to miss out on my chance to talk to people involved in research or plant conservation! I enjoy those interactions that result from my posting of sensitive species.
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Is there a way to see if your data will be obscured before the end of filling the observation? Or is it I havent noticed yet the change…
Should I put down my observation and obscure straight away because of the risk of seeing crowd of mad photographers wanting to make the scoop, or can I rely on the system, and for some cases like here adapt to local considerations e.g. mustela nivalis is uncommon in Switzerland but almost never seen in Geneva…
i wouldn’t support username obscuring rather than date, for a lot of reasons. it would create a ton of problems including with copyright, and would make it really hard to do data quality control or ask questions about the observation.
Exact date is rarely if ever meaningful to me. I wish there were an option to submit observations with only month as a time, anyway. maybe it is more useful for some insects but isn’t identifying insects only by timing kind of circular (like subspecies-by-location stuff) and totally excludes the potential to collect data on phenology changes due to climate change, etc?
Welcome to the Forum @vbe01. These are good questions!
At least if you are using the web site to upload, you can first look up the taxon page for the species you will be uploading, and click on its Status tab to see where it is given taxon geoprivacy and why. For example, on the taxon page for Ophrys apifera, you will see that the species currently has obscured taxon geoprivacy in Austria, Croatia, and Switzerland, but has open taxon geoprivacy in Sweden (and anywhere else not listed as obscured).
If the taxon currently has obscured taxon geoprivacy where your observation is located, it will be obscured automatically by the system when you post it. But, sometimes taxon geoprivacy can be changed later if the community has a discussion and agrees that obscuration is not necessary because any threats to the species are not from knowledge of locations. So, if you are concerned about revealing the location of a particular observation, you should obscure it yourself (or consider not posting it at all), and not just rely on the system to do it for you.
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That said it is a good thing to obscure geoprivacy, as you mentioned O. apifera, I did post last year some observations: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/49737121
This site I went to visit this year and found on the more than 70 plants, none… all have been removed… The same with the one nearby my home, explanation : people posted on FB knowing where I usually go for walk, and took pictures…
So for plants, yes it is dead important, insects we can discuss as its hard to keep them in a limited area if they wish to move, birds is important during nesting period etc…
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That is sad - pollinators have lost their food source - plants can’t set seeds.
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About pollinators, I assisted at a presentation of a bachelor work ( or was it master? I forgot, getting old…) I was member of Jury for a price of the SEG ( Society of entomology of Geneva - Switzerland ) about the impact of wild bees as pollinators… the interesting thing I learned: domestic bees are lazy and will rather stay at home than going out far doing their job, unless there are wild bees out there and so enter in competition… The trouble with wild bees, though there are quite a lot of species, this student counted more than 50 that had a role o importance in her work, they are all at some extent specialised, which in not the case of domestic bees, and so suffer from loss of vegetal biodiversity, with the loss of these bees, the domestic become less productive …
As I said in an earlier post, date is usually just one factor identification of cryptic butterfly species. iNat photos are often very poor. Yes, we might be able to tell that it’s one of 2 or 3 “look-alike” species, but we have to factor in the location and date to narrow things down. Obscure the location/date, and you make this analysis more difficult.
And I can easily turn your argument on its head. If our taxonomical hypothesis revolves around species having certain ranges and flight seasons, how can we revise that hypothesis if the location/dates of observations are obscured?
We are currently figuring out the range and phenology of a new butterfly “species” that has been identified in Ontario. This is happening “live” on iNat right now. Within the last week, I pointed out two significant observations where the photos showed enough detail to positively identify the individuals, and so the date/location of the observations in question could feed into our model in real time. Sort of an “Aha! now we can show that X definitely flies this far North on this date, and can factor that into other observations where the photos are more ambiguous” kind of moment. There have been other cases where the presence of an elusive species has been nailed down in more or less real time thanks to iNat (observer posts an ambiguous photo of something they think is a common species - expert on iNat can figure out from date/location that it probably isn’t that - but may be something rarer - observer goes back next day and gets unambiguous photos - expert goes there during the next flight season to verify presence, and fans out to locate multiple populations in an area where the species had never been reported before - citizen science FTW). Finding out the location of a (locally) rare species isn’t always a bad news story. Over zealous obscuration would make this kind of thing much more difficult.
In our area, there are very few butterfly species that are genuinely in danger from poaching, yet a large number of species have taxon geoprivacy. That’s a separate issue, but a general culture of data obscuration makes my job even more difficult (there’s a field technician who benefits from my identification skills whose profile advocates that observers obscure all their observations, even those for common species).
I know that the situation is different for herps and some plants. And yeah, I know that poaching is a thing. But like I said, I’m not talking about taxon geoprivacy here.
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Exactly. For our project, we’re probably looking at ~40,000 observations added to iNat in 2021. Between geoprivacy and taxon geoprivacy, there’s going to be a lot of observers we will have to contact to beg for permission to see their obscured observations. That takes time. And that’s for post facto use of their research grade observations. To get to research grade, their observations have to be reviewed first. Do you know how long it takes to review ~40,000 observations? It goes pretty quickly when you have nice clear photos, and all the data is entered correctly. But when you have to pause to evaluate a observation in detail, or correct an error in identification, it slows to a crawl. If you then add more obstacles in the form of data obscuration, it slows things down even more.
But escalating data obscuration on iNat has a knock on effect. There’s an implied restriction in how we can use observation data. What good is obscuring observation details on iNat if those details will be revealed through some other project that has access to the data? As I said in a previous post, I don’t want to get blowback from someone who granted me permission to use their data because I revealed the date of their observation via our project. Therefore, I’m going to lobby for our project to only use observations that have geoprivacy set to open. Since my time is a finite resource, I will only review observations that have geoprivacy set to open.
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