yeah, i don’t know the extent to which the iNat staff work with and talk to people in the field doing anti-poaching efforts, and hopefully they have to some extent, but it seems a LOT of the people who keep pressing for more and more things to be obscured don’t have any data or evidence to back up what they are asking for so it is problematic in a wide range of ways. And… outside the iNat community, i have encountered some very extreme views on ‘geoprivacy’ from some herper types who um, probably shouldn’t hvae those locations themselves. They were very secretive about these populations and i DO think we should obscure herps at risk of poaching at least in some cases but… without knowing where there secret populations are how do we deal with the huge elephant in this room which is SOME OF THE HERPERS POACH and the same is true for orchid lovers, etc etc. And it’s worth thinking about what an existing, established poacher would push for. I’m not a poacher, so I can’t really say for sure, but my buess is poachers would pushhard for obscuring, so their secret sources don’t come up with competition. And most of them undoubtedly see themselves as ‘okay because it’s just me and i just take a little’ which… they may not be unbiased enough to decide to say the least.
I once read a story from the 70s about a population of rare ferns only the local botanical community knew about. Obviously there was no inaturalist. It was a well kept secret. but… one day the botanical club went on a secret visit and someone had ripped up and taken the ferns. One of the botanists, almost certainly. Other wanderers like deer hunters who saw the ferns would probably think ‘wow neat ferns’ but not even know they were rare. My point here is that poaching and inappropriate collecting already happen, and secrecy hasn’t stopped it, and unless we have evidence it HELPS, we should be balanced about it - there are things we should definitely obscure, but we also shouldn’t go too overboard with it when it may do MORE HARM.
And if others beyond EarthKnight have worked in the anti poaching world I’d love to hear their thoughts here too. I haven’t worked directly in that field.