Excellent!
Will see how the obscuring actually plays out once they are implemented. Right now a whole bunch of dumb things are newly being obscured in Ontario (including the #1 most reported species in the province!) but as you’ve said above that is hopefully temporary:
The second phase (late March) is to open up (i.e. remove) obscuration due to taxon geoprivacy for some species in some places.
However, I’m still concerned about this:
Others chose to stick with the method of obscuring all of their “tracked” species and/or species with ranks of S1-S3.
It would be helpful to know which provinces/territories these are? If it’s the territories or PEI it probably won’t change anything from the current situation anyways. If it’s Ontario this is going to cause a lot of problems.
Obscuring all S1-S3 or tracked species is simply not reasonable in the long-term. It’s great as a stopgap until someone can come up with a better list - but overall it is clearly going to result in way too many species being obscured. I see three options here, from worst to best:
- The S1-S3 species are blanket obscured with no judgement (the original situation on iNat)
- The above lists are changed by curators over time. The changes are rather haphazard and disorganised, and are surely wrong occasionally. (This is the current situation)
- Experts compile a list of species that should be obscured using their judgment and experience. (where most provinces will now be)
Moving from 2 to 3 is great! Even if I disagree with some or many of the species on that list, this process is sensible as long as somebody has actually gone through and used their judgement for each species, and as long as their judgments aren’t completely ridiculous (e.g. obscuring Monarch butterfly).
However, if these CDC’s come back and say “Obscure all rare species” (i.e. moving from 2 back to 1), this is not an example of:
the most up-to-date and accurate information is used to determine which species are obscured.
Rather, it is them saying “We cannot, or will not, use our judgement to determine what should and should not be obscured”. There may well be a good reason for this, I have no idea what kind of resources are available to the CDC’s. But the idea that iNat will then implement their (non-)suggestions anyways seems really backwards to me.