Hiya! I’ve been wondering about something. Recently I added a bunch of observations from when I visited a zoo in the Netherlands, however when I look at the map with my personal observations the locations of these animals are displayed randomly in an area around the zoo?
They’re all supposed to be at the same location (Ouwehands Zoo in Rhenen), only the dark blue pointer dot is correct, the lighter blue ones are not and are scattered around the area. I thought I maybe set the addresses of the light blue dots wrongly, but when I click them the addresses are indeed listed correctly as the zoo, so that’s not the issue either.
Is this a glitch of the map and/or is there a way I can fix this?
Does this include captive animals? Some of these observations are indeed of endangered animals (e.g. tigers) but I marked them all as captive, I’m not sure if that makes any difference.
I worry it would also be easy for poachers to dispute the species ID of an endangered animal for something else, bringing the observation down to a status-lacking clade and temporarily removing the obscuration of the observation.
The issue is what @SQFP says – the location has been obscured to protect the animals. This can be annoying – I once spent too much time trying to correct obscured locations of my observations of terrestrial plants because they were shown in the ocean! And you could argue obscuring is not necessary in this case because the animals are already protected in the zoo. However, usually this is a valuable feature, annoying though it sometimes is.
Once an observation has been IDed as a taxon that is obscured due to taxon geoprivacy, disagreeing to a higher level taxon and moving the CID to that will not lead to unobscuration. So poachers can’t just disagree in bad faith to unobscure data.
For what it’s worth, iNat is for observations of wild organisms, it’s not designed for observations of zoo animals, pets, garden plants, etc. It’s best to not make iNat observations of those things, or at least keep them to a minimum.
