Really? I would have though more along the lines of:
A-well-a everybody’s heard about the bird!
Bird bird bird, b-bird’s the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, bird is the word…
Seriously, though,
I would be more worried about the realtime GPS tracking of our mobile devices. My Google Maps timeline isn’t available on the website anymore like it used to be, but even having it accessible in-app suggests that a nefarious person with the right tools and skillset can get it. “Find my phone” apps lend supporting evidence.
One thing related to this is that it’s a good idea to obscure the location of all observations on a day you have one of a rare species, because if (for example) you were on a trail with a bunch of observations of common species, someone can interpolate where the one obscured one is based on the time the picture was taken.
although this does make interpolation harder, the possibility of interpolation is not the the most significant problem with the way locations are obscured by the system. without going into much detail, i would argue that the underlying coordinates stored in the system are never really completely inaccessible to randos on the internet.
and i would say that while using the system’s obscuration is better-than-nothing protection, if you really need to make sure a location cannot be known by randos, then you should never post an observation at that location at all.
I don’t know how sedgequeen does it, but I take photos with a camera with built-in GPS and then upload the photos when I get home.
As for worrying about someone figuring out where I live, I remember the days when my address was printed next to my name and landline number in a paper phone book. Nowadays, there are much easier ways to find out where I live than analyzing my pattern of iNat observations. That said, I don’t upload observations when I’m travelling away from home. (Which is why I’ll need to upload two weeks’ worth of photos from Mexico starting tomorrow, now that I’m home.)
I don’t use a GPS in my camera. I do have a little GPS unit I can take with me. Often I photo what that it tells me. I use photographs of scenery or my hand as a signal that I’m changing locations. Other times I just know where I am and take a photo of the location (including signs, if relevant) to help me remember, then I look up the location when I’m uploading to iNaturalist, using either iNaturalist’s maps or Google Earth. This can result in fairly large accuracy circles, though usually I break up all the observations on a walk into groups, e.g. between locations A and B, then B to C, to reduce the size of the accuracy circle to something I consider manageable. Having the camera stamp a location on the photos would make uploading faster. Maybe some day I’ll take the trouble to figure out how to do that. Probably not.
As to hiding the whole day’s photographs to obscure one rare plant, I probably wouldn’t do that. Obscure everything at the site of the rare plant, yes. But whether obscuring the other locations is important depends on things like how far it is between sites, how close the plant is to the road or trail you’d obviously use, and whether the habitat is so unusual that pointing you into the general area means you’ll inevitably pinpoint the location. It also depends on the plant; very few people care about rare grasses and fewer could recognize them if they saw them.
It you open the app on a phone and make an observation then you have the location. If I am taking the photo with the phone then I just take the photo through the app or take the photo with the phone camera and use the add media option to add it to the observation. My not so smart phone is rather old and can’t attach locations to the photos, but has never seemed to have any problem accurately plotting the location of the observation even when I don’t have service. When I am taking photos on my camera I just make an observation on the phone and type in the photo numbers into the notes. When I am home I just upload the observations from the phone (which become causal because they have no media) and add the photos from my camera via my computer.
My camera does not have GPS, and my phone does not have a camera and is incapable of running apps. If I’m out surveying, I record on the paper what point number goes with what observation (description of the ob, not photo number, which I don’t find out till I get home), or if it’s far from a traverse point, I record a point with my GPS pole and put whatever I observed in the description. If I observe elsewhere, such as near the doctor’s office or at home, I make a mental note. I normally upload within a few days so that I don’t forget what was where.
If I’m on a trip and bring my laptop, I can copy the pictures to my laptop just as to my tower at home. I haven’t since joining iNat made a trip to where I couldn’t upload them.
there’s a few iNat users whose abusers have used their post history to stalk them.
back when I was a woman I aired far more on the side of caution than I do nowadays. it’s a personal decision, and you know better than anyone how much you are at-risk. POC, women, minors, and anyone with abusive family/exes must and should be excessively cautious. You can always un-obscure an observation later.
I remember one iNatter who retreated from observing to protect their children. Changed their thumbnail picture, then their name a couple of times. Now gone silent. Since they were active, it leaves a sad gap - also here on the Forum.
When I think of the technical capacity and knowledge required to figure out my location on iNaturalist, combined with how shockingly few people I know have any interest in it, for me there seems to be a very low risk associated with using the app. But the point about not posting when you are out of town is always good internet security.
Note that this is not really for posting observations to iNat (which I don’t generally do), and I don’t worry about precise locations of individual observations.
I jot down each location I visit, I make a list of species observed, and the start/stop time for the survey. This allows me to correlate any photos I take with a location based on the timestamps on the photos. I look at satellite view to choose a central lat/long for all observations I made at a given location, and a radius that covers the area that encompasses all the observations made at that location. For the kind of surveying I do, that’s plenty good enough, and it partially mitigates concerns over revealing the precise location of rare species. I sometimes take reference waypoints in the field. On rare occasions, I will record a GPS trace of my route.
I’d be more worried about endangered organisms that can move on their own free will than I would about endangered plants. While I would personally rather not obscure everything I saw that day if I saw a really good, rare bird that I would want to protect, I would suggest making more observations around the general vicinity in a few spots but a couple miles away from each other and upload everything from that day together and then a day or two later upload the rare species, or upload the rare species in a different upload batch. That would provide the best protection if there was genuine concern about protecting that specific individual or species as a whole.
There actually is a market in certain orchids and succulent plants. Those I would obscure. Not every rare species, though. Obscuring can actually be a problem for managing rare plants because we need to know where the plant is and whether it’s still present where it was before. That need has to be balanced against the risk of poaching or other threat to the plant.
Do you mean “managing” or “observing”? Managing would seem to imply that a group of experts will take some form of action if it’s not where it was before… this implies collection, propagation, and re-establishment. It’s great if this is happening, but… how to determine which experts are the real experts? I’d argue that the real experts are local, have a vested interest in the area where the orchids already (or once) existed, and that the property owners that have the orchids in that same area can introduce themselves to those local experts such that they can obscure (or privatize) online observations while still allowing access to the experts.
Poaching of succulents from the Northern Cape is a humungous issue. Set plant ‘collectors’ against rural people struggling to survive - and nature conservation loses.
Seems to me that you are taking vast leaps to erroneous conclusions from the word “managing.” Managing rare plants usually means protecting them in the place where they are. That’s the best way to ensure their survival in the long run. It means cooperation between landowners and those who know where the plants are and what they need, to establish management plans that will protect the plants. Often that management involves simply leaving that area of land alone but some rare plants have different requirements including a need to remove competing vegetation. Making that management decision requires knowing the plant is there to manage.
Important example where I live: Forest Service and BLM (federal agencies in the U.S.) are major land owners. Their lands are used by diverse people with diverse and often conflicting goals; recreation, hunting, grazing livestock, cutting trees for lumber, gathering mushrooms (commercially or for private use), mining, generating electricity, protecting rare plants, preserving intact examples of ecosystem, etc. Most uses that will have a big impact on the ecosystems (including rare plants) require permits. The permits won’t be given if the action will have a very bad impact on very rare plants or animals, or the action permitted will be limited in some way. However, if the agencies don’t know the rare plant is there, they can’t protect it. They need to know the location with enough precision to know if it’s in the one potential timber sale area or another and often where it is within that area.
Similar issues are involved with management decisions on state lands, including roadsides. Some private landowners also take rare plants into consideration when deciding how to manage their lands. The tribes almost always do. None of these agencies, people, tribes can make decisions to protect rare plants if they don’t know where the plants are. That’s why making unobscured or lightly obscured records is so important.
Effective management of rare plants also requires some level of monitoring. Are the plants still present? Ideally, the monitoring should include information on population sizes, which iNaturalist isn’t good at producing, but simple presence/absence data is helpful.
Sometimes management of rare plants involves “collection, propagation, and re-establishment” but those things are expensive, prone to failure, and very likely to result in loss of genetic diversity. They can be useful supplements to management of wild populations, but relying on ex situ preservation is unwise and everyone with any valid claim to be an expert in the subject knows that. Fortunately, with plants one can collect small amounts of seed from most populations without having a negative effect. (The percentage of seeds of wild plants that will become reproductive adults varies from low to vanishingly small.) Therefore, seed banking or establishing additional populations can often be done without harming the plants where they belong.
Who are the experts in this whole process? Local landowners can be experts in the plants on their property and how to manage them, though frankly too often they are not; many people just don’t see plants as more than a kind of green blur. Landowners who don’t live on the property (including owners of timber lands) generally don’t know. Other people who we hope are experts include agency botanists and land managers, members of native plant societies, interested members of the general public, academics, and others. (I say “we hope” because too often they’re not.) Important work is being done in each U.S. state by the heritage programs and similar organizations (run by the state or by NGO’s) that accumulate data on where plants are and provide that data to people who want or need it.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. You are correct… I am thinking about it from my own perspective (which is much smaller in scale)… although, if pieced together with thousands of other small land owners… possibly larger. How can we offer up what we have to those who might be interested without revealing too much about what we have to those with ill intent? And without taking too much time away from the rightful (and heightened) focus on larger, publicly owned, contiguous properties.
Despite our small size, many of the competing use cases mentioned, we are able to forbid (recreation, hunting, cutting trees for lumber, gathering mushrooms, mining, generating electricity)
Just northwest of Greenville there is an area slated for development as a “megasite” in an attempt to bring in more industry. The land is currently wholly owned by Weyerhaeuser. (This was one of the reasons the site was chosen – only one landowner to deal with.) Now, in some areas, some Weyerhaeuser lands are open to certain public recreational uses, but I have not found any references to this particular parcel being so. Therefore, it is not too surprising that when I look at this area on the observations map, the only open observations (except for that blue point) are the ones that I posted along the public road that bisects the site (the other roads seen are Weyerhauser’s private roads); all the rest of what look like observations there are obscuration dots and therefore may not have been observed on the site at all:
My local Sierra Club group has a team, which I am on, dedicated to following the developments of this megasite. I had in mind to make a project tracking its biodiversity, but when I saw this map, I decided there was no point – there isn’t any real data. From the road, it all looks like monoculture pine plantations, but with no real data, we can’t be sure.
absolutely it is of concern when I am am posting, at least for herps and herping. I would recommend obscuring pretty much all records of any species that any poachers, collectors, thieves or hunters would have any interest in. Also A reminder, if you are in an area and you find a rare or threatened species, even if that species is auto obscured, please obscure all of your observations from the site where you found that species. For example, I know of multiple timber rattlesnake dens where people obscure the records of the snakes, but not the observations from the area, which is basically the equivalent of an unobscured record, which has resulted in the killings of hundreds of snakes while they are sleeping peacefully in their dens. and its pretty easy to find this happening on all corners of the platform. I personally think it is very helpful to for example have something on my profile that says “if you are a researcher or wildlife management officer who needs the actual info for research, HMU and i can give you it privately” rather than giving that information out by keeping the loations unobscured. I personally am far more afraid of threatened and vulnerable animals being poached than my personal safety when I am posting, but whenever I am at a persons house I always obscure locations just bc I don’t know what there preference is about it and its better to be safe than sorry. If you are worried about your personal safety or the safety and conservation of species at a specific locality, you probably shouldn’t be posting it on Inaturalist at all. You and/or the animals safety is 1000X more important than some observation
