All my observations are on private land or rights of way adjacent to private land. A few are lot corners or trees next to lot corners. I’ve been obscuring anything at home or within a few hundred meters and making everything else public. All the public ones, except for several in two pictures I haven’t posted yet, are on or near land I’m surveying. Is this good policy for obscuring observations or not?
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Obscuring the location should IMO only be done if you have privacy concerns or on species threatened by poaching/eco-tourism (which is usually done automatically if the conservation status of the taxon is set accordingly.
I only obscure the locations for observations I make directly in my home & my parents’ home and garden.
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Privacy, poaching, or possible trespassing
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Public whenever possible, Obscured is usually fine though. The only one I really don’t like a Private because then, we are only aware that the shot was somewhere on the planet, not helpful when making ID’s.
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I don’t think that anyone else can judge this for you but yourself. Obscuring definitely does reduce the usefulness of observations, but this is a trade off that each user needs to make for themselves. What you laid out seems reasonable to me, but that’s just me! For my home location, I have picked a spot within a given distance to my home that I am comfortable with and set it as a pinned location. The accuracy circle includes the true location, but this gives some protection. I chose this because it provides better accuracy than obscuration - a sort of manual obscuration. But I wouldn’t take the time to do this for another location - I’d just obscure.
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Just speaking honestly and with a lot of personal bias, I find it annoying or frustrating that so many of my peers default all of their observations as obscured (talking about plants, specifically). It seems to become more and more popular and it must be driven by the idea that it is somehow dangerous posting the locations of plants. It does depends on your region, but in my region the threat of poaching is remarkably slim. There are only a few well known species that are still poached in any sort of meaningful numbers, and we’re all aware of what these species are. 99% of all the other obscured observations are of relatively common, mundane species.
If you’re obscuring all your observations of species that are A) too numerous and ubiquitous to be threatened by poaching and B) not even under the threat of poaching in the first place, then you’re kind of defeating much of the real world usefulness of this platform. After all, nearly all herbaria now have digital records of their specimens, meaning anyone and everyone can access specimen label information. Those who are bound and determined to find the locations of populations of plants can easily do so with some sleuthing.
Yes, I understand, there is the fear of poaching and of harming sensitive habitat, but this fear is so overplayed it could almost be a meme (again I am speaking strictly within the context of my region). I think there’s something deeper, though. In my opinion, one of the most powerful ideas behind the existence of iNaturalist is the way it can spread knowledge that was previously more hidden behind hierarchical social structures. It is crowd-sourcing knowledge about the natural world. It’s not perfect, but it’s miles better than the previous “well if you want to learn about this then you need to go to school for it, otherwise stay out”. I think the fad of obscuring everything does play into the old fashioned sentiment that we have to keep knowledge about the natural world hidden from the masses.
That’s a massive, probably pedantic rant of mine lol! I’m sure there will be those that disagree or believe that I am reaching; perhaps I am. However in my experience I do see those threads connecting.
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In terms of obscuring and private land: I obscure when I am on private land (with permission) that the public is not allowed to go, unless the landowner specifically requests otherwise… This doesn’t apply to publicly accessible trails on private land. In my area there are cases where there is private land it is OK to wander around on and it gets a bit ambiguous but in general… anywhere i am going with permission from the landowner (personal time or work) i usually obscure. It’s true it reduces the value of the observations, but the reality is if i wasn’t obscuring i wouldn’t post them at all, and it’s better than nothing. I do wish the visualization for obscured observations worked better on the map. I don’t like them being placed in random locations, it makes it really hard to see where open observations are. I wish they were placed on a grid or else just with a big colored rectangle. Those would make the obscured observations less annoying to deal with. But it is what it is.
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Agree with others that obscuring should only be done rarely – it defeats the purpose of citizen science and having a public database of observations to begin with. Also there are lots of options short of obscuring that will avoid almost all the potential problems that could stem from providing precise coordinates.
With private property, I would just include in the description of the location some indication that it is private, e.g. “(private property)”. Also, if you want to be extra cautious, rather than making precise coordinates public, you could just use a more general description of the location and include the location within the accuracy circle. None of this requires obscuring anything. (The latter is what I do for observations near my residence – obscuring such observations is generally unnecessary and undesirable in my opinion.)
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Disagree with a few things here.
-obscured observations don’t defeat the purpose of citizen science as they can still be used for a lot of things like phenology data, and also are of value to the person making them
-making an unobscured location with a big uncertainty buffer is actually worse than obscuring, because with obscuring you can allow researchers and trusted people to see the real location whereas if you make a fake location you can not. Plus YOU lose the location data for yourself. iNat isn’t just for other researchers to use, it’s also for each user to use and enjoy.
I used to do the same thing with big uncertainty buffers back when the obscuring worked differently, but given how it is now i think it’s a much worse apporach than just obscuring.
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For me personally, I use inaturalist a lot to find rare orchid locations - but for some strange reason a lot of people specifically obscure all their orchids. Needles to say I’m really grateful to those who do not, so other people like myself also have a chance to see those flowers. And conversely I almost never obscure anything I find, as a way to return the favor. Only exception is for poaching concerns (only 1 out of 70 orchid species in Austria is at risk of poaching, but it already is obscured automatically by inat).
I’m not one to obscure a lot of things, but i nearly always obscure orchids. There are some i do not, like very common ones, but if i don’t know for sure i obscure.
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a surprising amount of biodiversity science that uses data from iNaturalist (or similar) ends up binning by grid cell anyway – including some things I have done myself. I say not obscuring it is always better, especially when higher precision is needed for a specific purpose, but I’m not clear on how important it is as a fraction of the applications out there.
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To speak to this, I find it frustrating that due to myrtle rust in Aotearoa, many (all?) plants in Myrtaceae have been set to some degree of endangered, with the result being that on iNat, even rather common species are automatically obscured, ultimately because they’re particularly prone to myrtle rust, and regardless of how common they actually are.
All the geckos out in the ocean… Seems it would be better to simply not visualise them on the map at all.
iNaturalist policy is to only obscure taxa automatically when they are threatened specifically by public knowledge of their locations. Other threats not affrected by such knowledge, such as the pathogen you describe, are generally not good reasons to auto-obscure. In those cases, I would flag those taxa for curation, and request that taxon geoprivacy be set to “open” regardless of their legal endangered status. (Unless local laws would make it illegal to do so…)
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Hmmm, looking at it now, the one I was specifically thinking of is no longer obscured, and has no “conservation status”. Unsure if it’s been changed in the last few weeks (I see no history though?), or if I just dreamed it…? 
But looking at all Plantae observations on the map, I observe a range of others, including the weedy Senecio biserratus, are obscured? Maybe I’ll make a day of flagging…
EDIT: Looking more thoroughly, it seems any plant with any conservation status is set to obscured.
EDIT2: I’m sorry for the dozens of flags, curators…
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I’m mainly concerned about someone finding that I have lots of observations in this one place, including some pictures of spiders and insects inside my house, and coming to attack or rob me. Where I live, anyone who knows the place can come, but it’s very unlikely that someone will find the house by accident. The crime rate here is very low.
Some of my observations are in a gated subdivision (e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/249741493). Should I note that in the obs?
You may want to contact the iNatNZ site admins directly at help@inaturalist.nz.
I will do this then!
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When a new conservation status is added to any species, the editing window has taxon geoprivacy set to obscured by default. The curator adding the status has to intentionally change that default to open when appropriate. So that may explain why many things end up obscured that should not be.
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