The idea of not including the observations in a project as a protective measure is silly because you can just go to the basic “explore” map option, zoom to an area, and redo your search within the zoomed map area, establishing an AOI of the pertinent area. The list view of that AOI will show the obscured species.
Hiding those observations from the makers of a project does not bring any additional protective benefit and it actively hinders the ability of the project founders to utilize iNat as a proper conservation tool.
Regarding the poaching issues, I work in an area with heavy poaching of everything. The poachers aren’t using anything like iNat, they’re relying on their knowledge of the area. The only people using iNat are myself, several of my employees, and a very tiny subset of the foreign visitors that come to the region. iNat is a good anti-poaching tool in the area as it provides us with an independent window into where certain species are found and into the ease of which they’re found.
I run three anti-poaching teams on the island, as well as partially overseeing activities of 60+ Vietnamese national park rangers.
Obviously the poaching concerns and levels of technological savviness vary by region, but, given that I work directly on anti-poaching measures as part of my daily work, I have some insight into it that people who aren’t actually directly working on anti-poaching measures don’t and often simply can’t have due to their lack of experience with the issue.
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.
I’m glad this topic exists- I just went to the project I started to collect a species list for a publication on our local watershed that the local university is working on- several vulnerable or threatened species within the study area are not showing up. I wouldn’t have figured out they were missing for a while yet if it weren’t for this topic! All the observations within the watershed for those species would be my own. If there was even just an option to manually add observations to umbrella projects it would certainly be a step towards making this less of an issue.
Maybe along with a notification system when obscured organisms are uploaded by a user: “The true location of these three observations falls within the collection area of umbrella project X. Would you like to include them in project X?” and then the usual geoprivacy options about sharing or not sharing with project admin.
None of the taxa that are missing from my project are in any way vulnerable to poaching, just habitat loss, and in spite of their state-based ranking are locally common.
Sounds like the better next step would be to flag the taxa for curation and have conversations about whether obscuration is really needed in the first place. More info here: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/curator+guide#geoprivacy
Thanks, this is good to know, I’ll pursue that. However, in the case of taxa that are determined to benefit from continued obscuration, the rest would still apply.
That’s a way of avoiding the greater topic of how iNat is to be implemented so as to be a better and more effective conservation tool and the issue of recent changes potentially undermining that goal.
Which recent changes? This has been the way collection projects/place filtering has worked at least since the inception of collection projects, to my understanding.
i know you already have heard my rant about this but… for others also reading this… i’ve repeatedly flagged taxa to get some clarity about un-obscuring, but there isn’t always clarity. And now anything in Canada we aren’t supposed to touch, and a ridiculous number of things are now being obscured, which is causing problems. I really think in the least there needs to be a more formal way to discuss auto obscure by taxon.
The thing with obscured things not showing up in smaller places I believe came up around May or June last year because it was right before the bioblitz i was helping put on. Granted it was also an issue in terms of dealing with private landowners wanting to add stuff but obscure it, but in that case, the whole thing didn’t make sense because people just don’t want their address online, i don’t think anyone cares if it’s known that they live in Montpelier or else they wouldn’t be doing the bioblitz.
There’s protecting the organisms by obscuring, and then there’s maintaining one’s OWN privacy.
We don’t necessarily want our whereabouts known. Think about users who are children. Should their locations be trackable? I think this can be a delicate and importnat matter.
This thread is getting confusing because there are several different topics under discussion. Might I suggest this thread be for discussion of “How should projects/places interact with obscured observations?”
I also don’t really understand what the “changes” being discussed are. As far as I know Traditional Projects still work just like they always have, and that’s still an option.
Collection Projects have numerous upsides as well as a few downsides - but I don’t understand how an additional option makes things worse?
That’s a completely backwards way of using the obscuring box. Should be the other way around (or at least based on a percentage of overlap).
I think more project owners that not would prefer the current system (where only observations that are definitely within the boundary show up). But having this as an option seems harmless.
Additionally, having to do two projects to accomplish one thing is really, really foolish. When I made this project before the geofenced ones were even an option and had to switch it over to the more current version because too many observations were being missed and there was no way to import a bunch of observations from different people in bulk.
I feel like you are doing two things here:
Gathering all observations with public coordinates that fall entirely within the project boundary
Gathering a certain subset of obscured observations in the area that you feel should be within the project.
I think with some changes made to how umbrella projects can be displayed, you could get as close as you’re ever going to get to what you want. Maybe make a feature request for providing ways to display umbrella projects that don’t emphasize that there are two different projects incorporated. Ultimately though, I think there is always going to be conflict between obscuring observations and incorporating them into projects.
i don’t think anyone is disputing that, or even talking about that in this thread. Though i cant speak for other people. Obviously people may choose to add obscured or private observations, and can also choose to not have their observations included in projects (though not sure if that applies to bioblitzes?) I am not aware of anyone on here asking for people’s intentionally obscured observations to be made public.
i agree this is getting confusing, but i’m reluctant to merge the thread with the other ones because that has just jumbled things worse. In terms of changes to geoprivacy, a big one to some is that in Canada all of the obscuring decisions were handed over to NatureServe and they immediately obscured a bunch of locally rare regionally common species. Obviously this has no bearing on obscuring in Vietnam. Other changes have been discussed in various places, but are still being figured out by iNat staff and not b eing posted here, and while i’ve got all kinds of opinions on all kinds of geoprivacy related issues, i’m not talking about any other possible changes here myself nor do I think anyone else is.
hmm, i’m not sure that is true. In the case of this Vietnam project i believe it is on an island so things falling in from adjacent areas aren’t really an issue. But, I personally don’t think either situation is ideal (nor is adding obscured observations to tiny places that reveal their location, for that matter).
I think the biggest ‘change’ here is that geoprivacy issues used to be mostly handled by ‘use common sense, nothing here is really secret’. The iNat admins seem to be taking a stronger hand in directing geoprivacy now, between the project issues, the Canada thing, and other issues that have come up. This could be a very good thing, but in my own opinion, i think it’s coming down a little too hard on the side of auto-obscuring too many things including species with no conceivable collection risk (for instance because they happen to fall on the edge of range of an administrative unit or something like that or because they are super obscure species only experts can tell apart anyway). This is definitely going to be an ongoing topic, and maybe we should move it all to one thread. I’m not sure.
In terms of changes to geoprivacy, a big one to some is that in Canada all of the obscuring decisions were handed over to NatureServe and they immediately obscured a bunch of locally rare regionally common species.
To be clear this isn’t quite true. Right now everything rare is being obscured but that seems to just be part of the process. Some subset of these things will be un-obscured in the near future. Remains to be seen what that subset is.
i think it’s completely true. It’s also true that some of them may be unobscured, but that hasn’t happened yet so until we know which are, we can’t say much about it
If you re-read the thread you’ll see what’s being talked about. Observations of certain species have only recently stopped showing in the project list view.
Not long ago I used to see all the observations in my project here, including the VU, EN, and CR ones, now those do not show in the project list view at all. This is a recent change and a highly problematic one.
The thing is that when the geofenced projects were introduced all those observations that are now failing to show in the list view were showing in the list view for the project.
As I’ve stated many times now, having them not show on the map (and having the coordinates not how on the observation data) is absolutely fine, the problem lies in that now those observations are also not showing in the project list, whereas they used to do so.
This was originally a traditional project, but that’s really not very effective here as there is no way to bulk import observations from an AOI to a project (and if there is now, to my knowledge that wasn’t the case in the past) and the majority of observations made in the area are by either me or by a rapidly changing body of tourists who only stay for a day or three and would have no idea that there is a project to add observations to (unless there was a prompt, another thing that would be a good addition to iNat). Hence the switch was made to the geofenced project, which initially acted much like a traditional project with the only major difference being that observations would be automatically added.
At some point in the not too distant past I started noticing a change and that observations were vanishing from the project, observations that had been in the species list previously.
As was mentioned above, that was (for better or worse) intentional design of the new Collection Project type from the beginning. So are you saying that, after switching to the Collection Project, some obscured observations were still showing up in the new format, and then sometime later still, they started not showing up? Or might the change in behavior have been coincident with your switch to a Collection Project format? (Apologies if you have already clarified this and I missed it somewhere…)
So are you saying that, after switching to the Collection Project, some obscured observations were still showing up in the new format, and then sometime later still, they started not showing up?
Yes, for quite a while the only difference was that observations within the area were automatically being added to the project rather than me having to hunt down each one individually (a serious waste of time considering that the majority of observers are here only very briefly on tours). For a long time all observations made in this area were showing just fine, then perhaps around last summer (maybe?) I started noticing that observations were going missing. Ones that had been visible previously.
i think this new rule came out in May or June of last year because it started before a bioblitz i was helping with. I don’t remember when collection projects started though
Ah, ok, thanks, so I guess that aspect wasn’t there from the very beginning of Collection projects. Appreciate the clarification.
So to clarify my own thinking on this issue, I would be interested in your (and anyone else’s) thoughts on a scenario I have in mind. Lets say for discussion’s sake that there is no obscuration at all on iNaturalist, either automatic or manual. Just observation coordinates and “accuracy” (=uncertainty) values around those coordinates.
Then let’s say there is a place-based collection project, and the only potential observation of a species for that project has a 2 km uncertainty radius with the center 1 km outside the project boundary, so that the project boundary intersects the uncertainty circle, but does not contain its center.
Would you want that species included in or excluded from the project list? What would be your threshold before giving the opposite answer? And would threatened or non-threatened status of the species make any difference in the answer?