Trepidation about moving Traditional to Collection Project: please allay my concerns

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I began my biodiversity project years ago, before Collection projects became a thing. When this happened, I decided not to convert my Traditional project over to a Collection project, because of concerns around data accessibility—particularly my concern that I would lose access to the coordinates of observations of rare species or species with obscured coordinates that had been shared to my Traditional project. I use this iNaturalist project to monitor biodiversity change with reference to a historical baseline, so having access to the coordinates is important to me. I am wondering whether things have changed since Collection projects were first implemented? It takes a lot of my personal time to manually add observations to my Traditional project; I am growing weary of this and I am now inclined to move to a Collection Project. Can someone please clarify what will happen if I do: will I lose access to the coordinates of certain observations on my project?

Thanks for your help
Andrew

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I don’t know about the coordinates, but couldn’t you just establish a new collection project and leave your traditional project as is? That way, you could see how the collection project works without sacrificing anything you currently have.

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This is a good suggestion, @m_whitson
I will give that a try.

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Good question - I, too, have a traditional project that I started precisely because it would be important for project admins to see coordinates on obscured observations. Apparently this is now also possible with collection projects, but maybe only with new ones and not converted ones?

Found on the help pages:

Collection Projects and Trust

As of February, 2021 it’s possible for collection project admins to turn on Trust for their project via the project’s edit page. This gives members of the project the option to allow the project’s admins access to the true coordinates of observations in the project that have a taxon geoprivacy setting of obscured and private.

Please carefully read the explanatory text for Trust on the project’s edit page before turning on “trust” for your project and make sure all project requirements are set correctly. If you change any project requirements, project members will be notified of the change and you will not be able to access any hidden coordinates for one week.

Note that Trust does not carry over if you convert a traditional project to a collection project.

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