My parents were able to carve out some space in the backyard for me to play in the mud, and took me out of the suburbs whenever they could, but only so much they could do. I wasn’t very happy.
The other thing… it’s ok to have secret places… there are places i obscure or else don’t use iNat at all in because… i just don’t want to share those places. Same with certain plants i find, or whatever else. That’s ok, that is fine. You are able to choose to obscure all that you want, and no one is complaining about that, or they shouldn’t be anyway. Because if you weren’t obscuring you just wouldn’t be posting at all. But it’s better not to create false data associated with them.
I certainly understand the concern stated in the initial posting, and agree with it.
That said, it has not been mentioned, I don’t think, that GPS accuracy varies with the device in use, satellite accessibility, etc… My intent in commenting is just to mention a factor in the subject (not necessarily to divert the conversation to a comparison of GPS devices and comparative accuracy). A GPS location may be off by several or even 10’s of meters. (This is from both published articles on GPS accuracy and from personal experience.) It’s possible that some “off-trail” observations (in areas where staying on-trail is required) might be artifacts of GPS accuracy limitations, the same as affects all observations to some extent?
Here in Haiti we have currently about 0.3% of species rich primary forest left. Means i have the choice to stay on the trails and document agricultural plants and weeds only. Or leave the trails, trying to find what escaped slash and burn agriculture and charcoal producers. … Staying on the trails, is in my opinion not an option here. In addition, intentionally obscuring the location data might be of no use, where the half life of a tree is shorter that the time span between two visits of a botanist.
At least in my current rural area, the majority of public wild spaces either lack trails altogether or the trails present are for snowmobilers and ATVs, or are actually logging roads that are used as such on surprisingly short rotations (and new ones pop up every year). Trails intended for use by hikers, naturalists etc. are often minimal or nonexistent. It does strike me that in addition to the broader philosophical issues Charlie notes, a stance against off-trail activity ignores the reality of the majority of the world’s trail infrastructure. Even when I was in NYC, my off-trail botanizing just revealed how much destructive off-trail activity occurs specifically because patches of green with no eyes on them are seen as useful hidden places for illicit activities. There are rare plant populations in a couple parks that would now be extirpated (for the installation of some eagle scout projects, no less) if it weren’t for observers like myself who go off-trail to monitor things parks officially does not staff sufficiently to keep track of.
yep. that’s a whole other issue. if community members aren’t visibly a part of a landscape, people who are engaging in… more problematic behavior often move in. And do a lot more damage. Same issue with obscuring rare species, though it definitely has its place too.
Yes, this goes to my point on the poaching thread a while back, that we need more naturalists out there “seeing” what is going on. People are a lot less inclined to pick their nose if someone is watching them :)
@kuyeda – i was thinking about this sentence, and i think you may want to look at the photo metadata that is stored in iNaturalist and is available for all to see. it doesn’t look like there’s a way to edit that photo metadata within iNaturalist itself, although if you use the obscure option in iNaturalist, that does seem to hide the GPS metadata that is loaded. so manually moving points on the map may not be enough to hide the true location of the observation, if you also upload the photo with GPS metadata.
personally, i like to shift points and increase the area of uncertainty like you’re doing, but my photos generally don’t include GPS metadata. so if my photos did have GPS metadata, then i’m not sure what i would do. just being untrusting of third parties to manage privacy in general, i probably would strip out the metadata before loading it, but that would make the process even more cumbersome.
i’m pretty sure the site strips out the data from the photo so you can’t just download the photo and get it. Otherwise what would be the point of obscuring? I find it disheartening so many people are mapping to fake locations to obscure, even if it is technically not ‘wrong’ with the uncertainty circle. Please try not to do it on a regular basis with plants, with animals that move around,maybe it doesn’t matter so much.
yes, i believe the metadata is stripped from the file itself, but the data is stored in the system. on photos related to observations that are obscured by the system, yes, it does look like the system hides the GPS metadata that it stores. but in this case that started off this thread, the observation is not obscured by the system.
I agree, and I’m also concerned about the “Explore” pages and checklists showing plants that are not even known to be there (and actually aren’t there).
Just agreeing that many lands, in the NY/ northeast at least, are trail-less and learning to traverse respectfully and with a sense of attention and wonder is a better lasting cure for bad choices in the wilderness than signage with little to no information that seem like rules for rules sake without context. People who get kicks from harm or bad behavior are not likely to abide by rules and signage but if they make a personal connection to the value of wildlife there’s a chance for a behavioral change. I personally get frustrated when I see people violate what I believe to be the best practices for engaging in nature but I take opportunities to educate gently yet assertively when I can as this can have an impact. I think simple obscuring works if there’s a question but trying to avoid observation off-trail or creating context-less rules that only address the worst in humans rather than the broader needs of our species are misguided in my view.
I do think all should follow guidelines as best as possible when entering private areas and /or public ones with specific rule sets. We can model good behavior.
frankly, i don’t see why it’s such a big deal to use a bigger uncertainty area. can anyone actually provide a real-world case where shifting something 100m to the west or whatever actually cause some sort of scientific catastrophe? as mentioned by another person in this thread, it’s very possible that GPS devices and GPS skills already cause the points to be off significantly in a lot of cases. and the originator of the thread said that she keeps the original data if anybody really needs it.
Well I already explained above that it makes the data useless for fine scale spatial ecology and mapping. Is that a catastrophe? As long as you make the circle big enough no, not really. I’ll just not use the data. But that is a loss.
Yes, good point to keep in mind for anyone trying to obscure locations by this method. iNat does retain the photo metadata that it strips from the photos. And using system obscuration to hide the geolocation metadata does not accomplish what @kuyeda wants, if for no other reason than the random obscuration point will likely still be off-trail.
I honestly do not see the huge issue with having a slightly inaccurate center point with an observation, if a species is abundant in an area, how does shifting the center point a couple hundred meters from its true location but perhaps being right on top of another member of its species affect the usefulness of the data if the main purpose of the data is mapping species occurrences? When I post observations of superlative trees, if the tree is not known to the park managers I will keep the geoprivacy set to open, in the off-chance that park staff may see the observation and learn about such a tree (some parks are really good about this, some are terrible), but if it is well-known to park managers what is the point in providing the exact location if they already are aware of it and its superlative status? More on fine scale observations, an example comes to mind from the Adirondack Park, some areas are so remote and most trails not shown on maps (and those that are shown are often terribly-inaccurate), so unless you have a GPS device, there is no physical way to record the exact location of an observation (then the accuracy of the GPS device comes into question as well), and regardless of what you do to the accuracy circle, you still won’t have much certainty if you covered the organism’s actual location. I’ve found myself struggling to try to find any kind of visual key as to where I might haven taken a photo, surely shifting the center point of an observation to protect a one-of-a-kind specimen doesn’t cause as much of a data loss as not knowing the location of an observation by sometimes half a mile?
As much as I agree with Charlie’s previous comment, I also must say that no matter how much people are exposed to the natural world, there is always going to be that one whacko out there who will want to kill any living thing just for the sake of killing it. That is never going to change, as much as I hate to say it. All we can do is try to make people see the beauty and importance of the natural world and hope it inspires them to do the same, but I certainly will never draw a map to a some incredibly special natural feature and give that map to the world to do whatever they want with. People need to be exposed to the natural world to see that they are a part of it, a part of the problem and a part of the solution, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t properly protect those places that are most valuable and allow total access, in the hope that someone will find a new respect for nature. It isn’t one or the other, like nature itself, the solution is finding the balance.
I don’t get what the confusion is with why people might care about precise locations. They can be used for a huge range of modeling and habitat studies that don’t work with coarser location data. For most of the monitoring I do anything that’s not within 50m or so is essentially worthless. If you don’t care about that, that’s fine, but you can’t really say it doesn’t matter because it does.
I also find it really frustrating that so many people think no one other than a reserve manager should have access to location data. There are so many reasons it’s valuable. Yes some things need to be obscured but, please don’t assume only the person in charge has use of the data. Sometimes people in charge can’t, or don’t make the right decisions. Among many other things.
Actually, I agree with you. I didn’t say that I don’t care about fine-scale observations, I do care about them and I try to make most of my general observations (species occurrences) as accurate as possible, but, like I said, there are always situations where precise locations shouldn’t given. I’m not talking about creating a fake location in another county, or another town, certainly within at least the same park, just not right on top of the real location. In the same sense as what you said about reserve managers, why should we assume that the people who have access to the data associated with obscured observations are always going to make the right decisions? No disrespect meant, but everyone makes mistakes and I feel we shouldn’t trust one group of individuals solely over another.