Research-Grade Observations From the International Space Station

I think @pfau_tarleton’s suggestion that a space station observer use the GPS data and just add the altitude in the notes is the most practical and hilarious way to address the location issue - definitely sounds like something I’d do.

Imagine being your average iNatter, wanting to see what observations are in your area, saying - wait a minute, what’s this observation at my house - and finding out it’s an I.S.S. observation! :joy:

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For me personally I think this is best left as just a fun thought experiment

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Raw iNaturalist data is not intended for biologists to make distribution maps. Researchers are expected to inspect and curate their own dataset when making distribution maps from iNaturalist data. Having RG observations of organisms outside of their expected range is an essential benefit of iNaturalist.

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I think part of the point of the article is that the survival of uncultivated organisms there is relevant to whether those organisms could contaminate other planets/celestial bodies if/when they got there on a human spacecraft. There isn’t any particular reason to believe Earth microorganisms can’t become regular old invasive species on Europa, for example. Of course, there are no plans (or capability) to send the ISS to Europa. But a cockroach in the hold of a ship could still become an invasive species at a location where the ship crashed even if it originally had no plans to go there. I don’t think there’s any consistently applicable way to add an ‘escape plausibility’ metric to the definition of wild for hitchhikers.

Well what country the observation was taken in is defined by international treaty (except that for the purposes of this rule the whole EU is treated as one country):

The basic rule is that ‘each partner shall retain jurisdiction and control over the elements it registers and over personnel in or on the Space Station who are its nationals’ (Article 5 of the Intergovernmental Agreement).

So to avoid territorial issues of using the actual GPS coordinates of the ISS (e.g., as of this writing there would legally be a tiny spec of the US territory at GPS coordinates that are somewhere in Indonesia), I think the location has to be either the launch site of the ISS module that the observation occurred in (assuming it matches the country of ownership) or something like the coordinates of the headquarters of the respective space agency (if not).

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Parasitic worms in a zoo elephant would definitely be wild, no different than worms in your dog. Unless a human purposefully infected the elephant and then didn’t provide treatment, the worms are wild.

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Oh boy, more wild vs. captive discussion. :face_holding_back_tears:

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I’d argue that the mold in the gym area should not be counted as captive (I wouldn’t consider mold in my bathroom drain captive/cultivated, either), but it definitely isn’t for iNaturalist, which is an Earth-based site. Maybe we need iAstronaut.

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But with a twist! :P

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Haha. I was about to say…but this time, in OUTER SPACE!!! :rocket: :rocket: :rocket:

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Your case could be interesting!

Imagine instead of parasitic elephant worm, something like a parasite of canids… The presence of canid a parasite in a captive dingo could possibly be transferred to wolf populations in north America or Europe!
Or even with the elephant example, perhaps there is some environmental requirements for some part of that parasites life stage that are present in the tropics but not in temperate regions… Or perhaps not… Those observations could highlight those factors…

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A roughly comparable example, but Earth-based, might be a gecko found on a ship in the middle of the Pacific. The gecko hitchhiked and could not survive at that location except on a human-made structure and no one intended it to be there. Would that not be wild by iNat standards? Wouldn’t you use the coordinates where it was observed?

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If our species makes it through the next few rocky decades/centuries, we may live in space in a more meaningful way, find life on other planets (and imagine the taxonomic fights on how to classify that!), spread life to other planets, or even create ecosystems in hollowed out asteroids or space stations (is everything captive-cultivated in a hollowed out Kim Stanley Robinson style hollowed out asteroid biome or do things become wild in there after a time?). At that point we’d need to re-design how iNat tracks location for sure, but we’ve got a lot of other things to deal with before we get there.

Example: some tardigrades escaped on the moon as part of an experiment gone awry. I think it’s believed they may be able to persist in dormancy there for some amount of time but not survive in their active form and reproduce. But if we were wrong, and they established a persistent presence there… in theory they’d be viable to add to iNat, except we have no way to map things on the moon. Sadly we are a ways from community scientists being on the moon let alone any of this other stuff, and captive experiments in orbit don’t seem to me worth putting on iNat with any location specified. They are already very intensively being studied elsewhere…

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If somebody posted this as a feature request, I would simultaneously be 100% supportive, urge it to the top of the list, and want it to be immediately implemented, and at the same time would urge Staff to ignore my pleas and work on something more immediately useful. :grin:

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I moved this to Nature Talk since it’s more of a fun thought experiment.

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If I’d find an animal in my car, I’d try to find out the place where it entered the car and use that. Maybe I should it mark as captive instead? I rarely travel more than 200 km, so the difference shouldn’t matter much (unless I happen to bring Xylocopa valga or Zoropsis spinimana into places where it wasn’t present yet, but I guess I’d see such huge beasts at the start of the ride).

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For now! :grin:

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The correct course of action is to mark it when and where you first noticed it in your car.

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A similar example is this Eurasian Robin, which hitch-hiked on a ship across the Atlantic and found itself in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon. Natural vagrancy (and subsequent survival) of this species at that location would be exceedingly unlikely. One of the most extreme of a series of remarkable observations in the “Birds on Ships” project. Although birds do have wings and can fly out to sea, so your gecko on a ship scenario is an even better one.

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Okay, for those saying hitchhikers aren’t wild:
Assuming that at some point in the distant future, humans will have colonised another planet and have brought some hitchhikers. Also assuming iNat in some form survives as long (which I hope it will)

At what point should a population of terrestrial organisms brought to planet Teegarden b (or anywhere else) by accident be counted as wild organisms? What if they are there and surviving for multiple centuries?
At some point they’d have to be wild/non-captive, otherwise, we’d have to mark all current neobiota as non-wild/captive…

I think that’s covered by the new “Established” annotation.