Observation Field tags with Endangered/Threatened Species?

General
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I work a lot with Observation Fields, specifically with tagging floral visitations on pollinator observations. Multiple times, I’ve encountered where the pollinator observation location is public, but the plant they are visiting would traditionally be obscured. For example, I just tagged a common bee located on the Threatened Cirsium pitcheri.

  • Do you think the bee observation should therefore be obscured?
  • Should I just not tag the plant species? Because the plants themselves are so rare, pollinator visitors are under-documented, and this would be a loss of cool data
  • What do you think would be the best thing to do here?
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If I were making such an observation, I would look at the taxon status tab (as you linked) to see if the taxon is obscured in the area where I made the observation, and if so I would obscure the observation. For your example of a pollinator on Cirsium pitcheri, if it were in the USA I would obscure it, but not in Canada (where geoprivacy is “open”). When in doubt, obscure your observations. This is much better than not adding the observation field - as you say, that would be a loss of important data. Most projects that might track pollinator observations will ask you to allow location access when you join them.

It would be nice if iNat could automatically follow the link in the observation field and auto-obscure these observations, but as observation fields are user-created there is likely no reasonable way to figure out which fields actually give away species locations, so I’d guess automation here is pretty much impossible. Which means the burden is on ethical users like yourself.

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You could ask the observer to obscure the observation before adding the observation field if you are really worried about giving a location away (and not add the field if they don’t).

I think the risk in this situation is less - you’re going to need a user who is quite familiar with iNat looking specifically for this type of data to get these locations. There probably also aren’t very many of these observations (compared to locations available via a typical route of looking at observation IDs). So I would err on the side of adding the observation field except in cases of species that are highly sought after by collectors.

I agree that doing some type of auto-obscuration to observations based on information that isn’t ID/location based is very unlikely.

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