Here I agree. I had a cyberstalker a while back, and while the situation wasn’t serious enough for me to stop making observations on iNat altogether, it would have been nice to have the ability to change my default to obscured, because I would often forget to change it when I was making observations on my phone.
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@bouteloa had a feature request for that against ‘stalkers’
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I wish there was a middle ground solution, that would allow me to have locations published with a delay, e.g. only after they are at least a month or a year old. This would (a) allow identifiers to ID the to species level and avoid having an observation be listed initially with a public location, and (b) help with observations of seasonal nests or plants.
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I’ve looked and I don’t think there is one. Which was actually pretty upsetting to me. Or to bulk-obscure–I’d like to do that with th eones from my garden.
I’m a herp guy. I think a lot of field herpers may go too a little too far in insisting on secrecy–I have zero qualms about posting well, what I’ve posted, but there’s species/situations I won’t post on iNat. Diamondback terrapins, if I ever find a wild alligator snapping turtle, den sites for rattlesnakes I’ve seen, if I ever get to Arizona and find a C. willardi…just not doing it. And I know plenty of herpers in other areas that have spots they’ll never post anything from because iNat’s obscuring isn’t really that great.
Even if I obscure a given record, looking at my other observations from the area will give you a good idea of date and time where it was found. Less of an issue with the parks near me since I post so much from there, but when I travel and all my records in an area are from the same week?
I’d like be able to batch obscure records, and I’d like the obscured area to be larger frankly.
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You can obscure multiple observations at a time on the web uploader - just select them all and then change the geoprivacy. There is no setting to automatically obscure all of a previous user’s observations in one go or all future ones, that I know of however.
If you have a home location that you observe a lot at that you would like to “obscure,” you can do this to some extent “manually.” What I (and a reasonable number of other people do), is to choose a point that is nearby to our property and within some distance that they are comfortable with their location being known, and expand the accuracy circle from that point to include the true location. You can then pin that location and easily use it for future observation uploads. In my opinion, this is better than obscuring in some ways, as the accuracy value can be much lower (ie, more precise - mine is 499 m to allow inclusion by anyone using a 500m cutoff). The observations are all at the same coordinates, so they can be IDed easily and changed in the future if needed.
There are previous discussions of the size of obscuration area on the forum. Some folks argue for larger, some for smaller. My personal sense is that a) the current size of the grid is a reasonable compromise value (some taxa might benefit from larger, some could safely be smaller) but b) there’s no momentum to change this from staff regardless.
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There is a feature request for draft mode.
You could then delay your upload till it suits you.
Identifiers need the location (more or less) for an ID.
That is a strange claim. I would say it is rather the experienced users who judge what level of location precision is necessary. I do this very often. I almost never use the private location option. It is way way too crude. Circle of a few hundred of meters is usually enough to hide the exact location of one’s house. Few hundreds of meters to a few kilometers is enough to hide an exact location of a plant that is otherwise publicly known to grow in the rough area. The large squares made by the private location obscuring is probably right for the tropics or othe large-scale wilderness, but even the official public plant distribution databases in our country do not go beyond obscuring the exact coordinates in the location description but they do show the right sub-square in the aquare mapping grid even for the rarest ones. This is much finer than the private location on iNaturalist.
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I can’t speak for plants, but for herps it’s really dependent on the species and rough location. And the risk varies a lot species to species as well.
There’s literally thousands of captive bred bull snakes, common kingsnakes (the old getula group) and rat snakes every year; most of the time those aren’t at great risk. There’s legal, affordable supply…and frankly their populations in general are fine.
Species with a high demand and lower supply can go for fair money though; things like Texas diamondback terrapins, alligator snappers, some North American milk snakes and some of the less common kings (think mountain kings, gray banded kings). Some garter populations fit this as well.
If someone post an obscured record, it’s pretty easy to pull up the general area in google maps, and look for promising habitat within that obscured area and focus on that–I’ve done that myself. Even moreso if the record is really recent–a lot of herp activity seems weather-dependent. I’ve had nights where I find 50+ snakes and nights where I get skunked in the same spot. But if poacher A knows roughly where to go, and sees records for a species they want popping up, they know it’s a good time to go do some poaching. I’d appreciate a way to obscure a whole batch of uploads, and the time obscuring could be better as well (maybe make it 2 months).
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On iNaturalist:
Obscured = kind of smeared out in a larger, standardized rectangle. Not precise, but giving a general idea of where the observation was. Identifiable and often useful for research.
Private = no location information at all shared, so we don’t even know what continent the observation is from. Therefore, useless for research and in many cases unidentifiable.
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OK, in that case I meant Obscured in everything I mentioned.
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I thought you did. The use of these words is narrower on iNaturalist than in real life.
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Terrapene is now obscured ( “vu” in United States (Source: Unknown)) for all observations, including those in Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Missouri. States where NatureServe (based on the independent assessment of nongame biologists) list it as Secure (KS, CO, NE, MO) or No Status (OK). They were not obscured in these states until just recently, and I can not determine a reason why (other than the statement above).
Obscuring these observations by default is disappointing. It seems to go against the principles of iNat in that it unnecessarily prevents the open data exchange between citizen scientists and herpetologists. Obscuring those records renders them useless for many analyses. Terrepene is not vulnerable to poaching in these states, no more than any other taxon is.
This simply isn’t true. Box turtles (Terrapene spp.) are the most commonly reported turtles involved in poaching cases, followed by spotted turtles (Clemmys guttata; also obscured on iNat). The Common Box Turtle (T. carolina) is the most heavily trafficked animal in the United States.
The USFWS recommends obscuring locations of sensitive wild turtle species in published scientific articles, presentations, and naturalist-oriented community science apps.
Herpetologists are not being unnecessarily singled out. The same happens for anyone who works on sensitive species. My past work has been on Black Rails, which are obscured on both iNat and eBird, and rightly so. Likewise, when my data was published, all my location data was obscured.
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I’m not sure I believe that. They’ve got much slower reproduction cycle than just about any snake or lizard that we have.
Don’t wild box turtles typically take most of a decade to hit reproductive maturity? They’re also significantly less commonly bred in captivity than most snakes or lizards that have any serious demand.
I think a lot of herp guys overstate the risk of poaching, particularly for very common and widespread species…but there are species that are more targeted and/or more at risk. I wouldn’t want to see ridge nosed rattlesnakes posted with their exact coordinates either
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Just a reminder that specific curatorial decisions should be discussed on flags on iNaturalist itself (there is already one for Terrapene) not on the forum. It’s fine to use specific taxa as examples here, but please keep the discussion focused on the general issue as opposed to hashing out whether a specific taxon merits obscuring or not, thanks!
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In case we forgot, the original issue was
…as a blanket precaution until they are definitively identified as a non-endangered species.
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