I am helping to run a bioblitz project next month and we are thinking about obscured coordinates and how to manage them. For coordinates that are open, they will obviously show up in our bioblitz project automatically (which is great!). For observations with obscured coordinates, they won’t show up if the randomly generated location within the bounding box is not in our bioblitz area (to my understanding of how that works). Given the shape and size of our bioblitz area, what that means is that basically any obscured observation will likely not count towards our bioblitz. The easy solution here is that people can join the project and trust the project with their obscured coordinates, which will let us see all observations, regardless of geoprivacy settings. This is useful to us because the Preserve managers want to know if people find rare things! That is one of the goals of doing the bioblitz.
Unfortunately, when joining the project via the mobile apps (and I checked on both Android and IOS), there is no option to trust the project with obscured coordinates like there is on the desktop browser version. That is true both during the process of joining the project and also once the user has joined the project. This seems to be a known issue [see this old feature request from 2022, for example]. In digging around in the API, it looks like, over the last 5 years, roughly 65% (basically two-thirds!) of observations in my county are submitted via a mobile app, so this seems to be a pretty major issue overall and certainly for our bioblitz.
What I am looking for here is whether people have had any experience communicating with new or less-experienced iNat users about how to trust a project with obscured coordinates? I can write up instructions that are basically like “log into your iNat account on a desktop browser, go to the project settings, and toggle the trust dialog” but that seems like a lot of steps and might be overwhelming for users that are inexperienced with the platform. Some folks I have talked to don’t even know that there is an option to login through a website and think iNat only exists as an app!
I guess I am looking to see if anyone has thoughts or advice on managing this. Any thoughts would be appreciated! Thanks!