Great news!
This brings back an old question: perhaps it would be wise to obscure the location of observations whose ID is broader than species level, because they might belong to endangered species - which might be promptly recognized and then stolen by experient but ill-intentioned people. Once an observation gets RG with an ID that does not correspond to any endangered species, then it would be OK to show its true location.
Any well-intentioned researcher who wants to visit the place in order to study the specimen or confirm its ID could always contact the observer and ask him/her to share the observation’s private coordinates.
I was going to post almost exactly the same. Should everything be obscured by default, with public as an option?
Publicly available data is a double hedged sword…
Another complication is that red lists vary a lot with the country/area… i.e. the IUCN red list is not universal, some endangered species are locally common, while other species not on this global list might be endangered at a local level.
And many species/taxons are not assessed, I’m sure many rare plants and insects are not listed as endangered (at least out North America and Europe)?
The issue about the non-universality of the IUCN red list goes beyond iNaturalist. GBIF also shows the locations of all observations in its database (if the record was imported with true rather than obscured coordinates, then its true location will be shown on the map).
Has anyone been doing any assessment of the potential misuse of these platforms? Are there any documented cases of specimens being stolen or damaged because their locations were made public? (Just an example: if a real estate owner wants to build a new touristic resort and then becomes aware of the existence of a rare species in that land, he/she will almost certainly destroy it before the Environmental Impact Assessment is performed, because he/she knows that the presence of that rare species would almost certainly restrict or block his touristic project.) I’ve heard some anecdotal cases of rare specimens being stolen for trafficking or destroyed to avoid restrictions, but how often does that happen? On the other side, to what extent does the mapping of living beings contribute to the conservation of biodiversity?
Do we have any objective idea about all this, beyond a simple intuitive guess?
Collectors might pay thousands for rare insects and plants, much more for larger animals. When you know to what extend some thieves and traffickers can go, the risk is certain, and potentially high I would say, even for rare species that are not traded in fact, since some collectors are so passionate?
Conservation, on the other hand, costs money! I found a butterfly in my plot of land with only one prior (and disputed) observation in the country, decades ago, (BTW just like the OP, I left it with a Genus ID, it was identified here on iNaturalist) I then signaled it to the local platform, even emailing a few words about the possible conservation issue (of the host plants), but without any answer so far. I’ll see what I can do myself, but it’s not like I had that proverbial silver spoon…
Preemptively obscuring all non-species level observations, even with an opt out option, would make using iNaturalist data more difficult for a variety of reasons. First, it’s helpful to have non-obscured coordinates when using iNaturalist data for GIS purposes, e.g. studying plant communities on soil types. Second, there are often clues as to a plant’s identity in the GPS imagery and in nearby observations. I’ve often identified plants by looking at observations of other plants in the same vicinity. Especially if the GPS makes it clear it’s in a cultivated place such as a university campus, it makes it pretty easy to tell that the nearby photo with flowers is the same as the flowerless plant another user uploaded. This may seem like a niche scenario, but it happens regularly for me.
Now, it may be that the benefit of obscuring these observations outweighs the drawbacks. However, I suspect that the number of above-species observations of endangered species is on the same order of magnitude as incorrectly IDed endangered species (in other words, we would still have the problem of an endangered species being misidentified as a non-endangered congener). When I combine this with the fact that there are few examples of poaching or destruction of endangered species based on iNaturalist records, it just seems like it wouldn’t solve any problems.
I have a similar example, with a different result. I’ve been able to present iNaturalist observations of rare plants on my university to the landscape managers, and they work around the rare plants where possible–there’s one spot on campus that just got turned into a vast lawn with the exception of the one patch of prairie grass that hides a rare plant that has only been IDed to genus (Opuntia). This would have been harder to do with locations obscured by default–not all users are active enough to respond to requests to un-obscure or share coordinates.
Here are some comments from professional botanists regarding obscuring rare plant records in California. These represent both sides of the argument. In my opinion, obscuring record locations is almost always bad for conservation except when poaching is an issue or a plant taxon is so rare that visiting it puts the taxon at risk.
I guess the answer would be to obscure observations at a genus level, only if this genus includes endangered species, in this general area? Some argue about the loss of data with obscured observations, but I guess many people don’t zoom all the way in before entering a location on the map so precision may vary a lot! and I know some users center the location on a false location and enlarge the radius so that the real location is included - as a way to hide a private property or for similar reasons (I even read that advice on this forum not long ago)… So in both cases, even if public, the accuracy of the geolocation might not be better than obscure. One should really only take into account observations with good precision value if working with GIS soil/associations, etc…
I would prefer a more nuanced approach evaluated on a genus-by-genus basis, which I think is how it is currently done.
I think it makes sense to me to have Terrapene auto obscured at the genus level because most/all members of that genus are highly sought after by poachers.
But auto obscuring all Carex makes little since to me since 1) this is an extremely diverse genus with likely very few species subject to high poaching risk, 2) this is a difficult genus to get to species level so many may be obscured indefinitely even though they aren’t rare.
Yes, but only for certain species. A global obfuscation of location data would cause chaos and, for very many species, be completely unnecessary. This should be only done for species that are at risk.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Do what you can with the data you have.
Developers have been pulling that stunt long before iNaturalist came on the scene. (e.g. Florida realtors vs. burrowing owls circa. twenty years ago.) INat, or related platforms, might make their work a bit easier but they have their own search and remove teams.
It seems to me a certain amount of taxonomic expertise is required here. It shouldn’t be that hard to decide which vertebrates should be obscured. Rare insects and plants are another matter. Someone should round up the relevant taxon experts to decide what should and shouldn’t be hidden.
I don’t have anything particularly valuable to add to the discourse as far as solutions go. Unfortunately I work in sensitive areas and I can’t justify the risk of inviting unwanted attention to them so I’ve started obscuring all of my observations, even those not taken at work, which makes me quite sad. I have reasonable confidence that at least a couple of my mushroom observations have been favorited by individuals looking for areas to forage and that was enough to make the switch.
On the other hand, I’m also somewhat confident that with my background in data/GIS I could figure out roughly where a portion of obscured observations actually were taken if I had ill intentions or was guided by greed. So I find myself questioning if it even helps if a truly motivated individual was looking for something specific…
Shh…That’s merely what the fanatic sedge collectors who are trading plants on the dark web for enormous sums of bitcoin want us to think!
Orchids? Soo gaudy. Nothing says sophisticated subtlety like a sedge.
Of course, it’s a often bit of a challenge determining what they have purchased, given the difficulty of sedge identification and the instability of the taxonomy, so it’s a rather risky investment, but no doubt that adds to the appeal.
Hey! Massachusetts cares about Carex - there are 30 Carex species on the state Endangered Species list, and proposed development in habitats for those populations is regulated under the Massachusetts Endangered Species Act, even on private land.
(OK, I admit one does have to scroll a long way down on that page to get to plants, however.)
If one cares about conservation, I think it should be the first move, only then after making sure there is no risk, should precise locations made public.
It’s only after finding rare species that were collected by someone else 2 days after I published them on iNaturalist that I came to this conclusion - but my posts have been removed from the correct thread…
The option for any user to have the location “obscured” by default instead of “public” should be available in the personal settings, maybe I haven’t found this option, yet?
I would err on the side of not obscuring anything, except taxa that are specifically threatened by poaching or being damaged by visitors.
Having observations obscured makes my work as a botanist much harder, and detracts from the platform in that it makes visiting rare and interesting plants much more difficult. In my opinion, this is a particular aspect of iNaturalist that attracts people to use it.
Some argue about the loss of data with obscured observations, but I guess many people don’t zoom all the way in before entering a location on the map so precision may vary a lot! and I know some users center the location on a false location and enlarge the radius so that the real location is included - as a way to hide a private property or for similar reasons (I even read that advice on this forum not long ago)… So in both cases, even if public, the accuracy of the geolocation might not be better than obscure. One should really only take into account observations with good precision value if working with GIS soil/associations, etc…
While many people may do this, the vast majority of users use either the gps coordinate automatically added by the app or the metadata from their camera, and the ones who manually enter the location by zooming on the map usually try to be as precise and accurate as possible.
As for using a large observation radius to hide a location, most users who do that simply are unaware of the obscuring option—in other words, these are usually new, inexperienced users who contribute a negligible amount of the data. In my experience, many of these users are posting cultivated organisms anyway. There are some cases where experienced users do this too, but it’s usually because an observation is very sensitive or by request of a landowner.
In any case, it’s pretty simple to account for the observation radius in GIS applications. But remember, obscuring an observation puts it in a random position in a box of a radius around 22 square kilometers. This is significantly more difficult to account for in a GIS application—I think you would have to essentially rasterize your layer data so that each 22 square kilometer area has one soil type, determined by plurality, which as far as I can see makes any analysis essentially worthless.
