At the risk of derailing this general update thread into a case by case discussion of the geoprivacy for each taxon in Canada, maybe it’d be better taken to email or private message? :)
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hmm, i didn’t think it was too off topic because i was trying to talk about the obscuring of common species (especially things like trees) that were being obscured here. But if it seems too off topic I can leave it be here.
I think it probably makes sense to have dialogue here as long as it’s not anything sensitive. Probably more efficient to have at least the initial conversations on the forum where others can see in case they have the same questions/concerns.
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Hmm, potential bug or unexpected result related to this update? Please move this elsewhere if not.
- Go to place for Canada
- View checklist
- Click edit on a taxon
- In many cases, it brings me to the listed taxon page for “NatureServe Canada” and not just “Canada”
That is, for Euonymus atropurpureus, it brings me to https://www.inaturalist.org/listed_taxa/5647087 instead of https://www.inaturalist.org/listed_taxa/19170415
Is this intentional? It appears many of the establishment means are no longer listed for Canada, when “NatureServe Canada” is the “primary listed taxon”. I became aware of this issue after trying to resolve this flag: https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/364552
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Hi Charlie,
Could you please provide me with the jurisdiction(s) that the species you are concerned about are being obscured in? That way I can email the appropriate point person for that CDC.
Thanks,
Allison
If the preference is to have the initial suggestion / dialog be done here and not via email communication, I would like to propose that the waterbird species still listed be reset to Open in Ontario.
This would include Long-tailed Duck, Redhead, Canvasback, King Eider. These species have a listing because a relatively small number nest in the province (they mainly nest further north), but are commonplace provincially in the winter, as seen by the number of records. These are also species which the MNR staff had been comfortable removing the listing for when entries could previously be edited by cuirators.
Outside of waterfowl, a similar approach is likely appropriate for Great Egret, Red-Necked Grebe and Horned Grebe which again are relatively low in nesting numbers but very common in winter and or migration.
Hi Allison, sorry about that… it was Ontario. Red spruce was the big one but also rock elm, pitch pine, and some other trees. I haven’t looked at the other provinces except Quebec which isn’t included. Thanks !
Can someone provide some information on the treatment of Monarchs? I believe that US observations are not obscured, but they remain obscured in Ontario. It is the most-observed species of lepidoptera in Ontario on iNat. And that supports what we have in the Toronto Entomologists’ Association Ontario Butterfly Atlas, where it is the most commonly reported species after the Cabbage White.
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I agree here. The main threat to Monarchs is on their winter grounds, not anywhere in Canada. Either it should be open or not to give any ideas, if Monarchs are obscured then logically every other butterfly practically should be obscured as they all have the same local threats and are less common.
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Can we confirm that the update is completed properly? I think almost nothing from Ontario has been unobscured.
It’s really silly to be asking us to email piecemeal for every single species or group of species, when they (CDC) could just look at the list of the most-observed obscured species (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=6883&subview=table&taxon_geoprivacy=obscured&view=species) and see tons of stuff where it is blatantly obvious they should not be obscured. If the CDC didn’t suggest that Monarch or Long-tailed Duck should be unobscured, they clearly either don’t know what they’re talking about or didn’t actually try to go through the process. In either case, I’m not sure why their input is still being considered?
In any case I’ve mostly prepared an email listing all the birds that should be unobscured, which I can hopefully send out in the next couple of days.
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Yes, Ontario is obscuring many, many more species than other provinces. For comparison with @reuvenm’s link, here’s everything obscured by taxon geoprivacy in Canada that is not in Ontario. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?not_in_place=6883&place_id=6712&taxon_geoprivacy=obscured&view=species
I dont know if this is something that can be looked at, or should be filed as a bug report, but the taxon_geoprivacy parameter is actually doing 2 things:
- records where the geoprivacy is actually set - makes sense
- it also appears to be collecting records which have been manually obscured, which of course is not actually the taxon being obscured. For example that query returns 8 records of Canada Goose, which has no obscuring defined anywhere.
Is it possible to make taxon_geoprivacy actually only work on the 1st case ?
There’s a subspecies level taxon geoprivacy for Canada Goose: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/236949-Branta-canadensis-occidentalis#status-tab
As far as I can tell, this should only return things obscured due to taxon geoprivacy and not other sources of obscuration. Please send URLs if you suspect there are any bugs in the filters. Thanks!
It still seems to be picking something else up. Perhaps if there is any ID of that subspecies. The URL returns 8 observations, but there are only 6 observations of that ssp in Canada.
2 of the records it is counting are classed as Canada Goose, but have an ID entered by at least 1 person as Dusky
Another example is it is picking up Herring Gull, for example the 1st record in the list is at the species level, has no other ID’s, yet is in this report as are several others?
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?not_in_place=6883&place_id=6712&taxon_geoprivacy=obscured&view=&taxon_id=204533&page=
The records are in 2 provinces that have a taxa conservation status listed, but both are open. Perhaps they did not get re-indexed ?
This doesn’t have anything to do with the Canada conservation statuses work.
But yes, every place has a default checklist and can have additional checklists and for some reason that goes back years the view for the default checklist (ie https://www.inaturalist.org/check_lists/7025) shows listings from all the place checklists. I agree this is confusing. Happy to discuss ideas for improving lists more on another thread
@carrieseltzer - what I think is happening is this, hopefully this is not too long or too much a guess on the technical side.
There are 2 ways that geoprivacy query could be running
- join the observation record to the table where the conservation states and obscuring data is stored and access it from there
- additionally based on the json of observation records, the field appears to be in the observation recod itself.
I’m guessing since it is faster, the 2nd is done.
That PEI Herring Gull record has in the json geoprivacy = obscured.
In March someone edited the Herring gull species, but we can’t see what changes they did. I suspect there is a good chance, they unobscured the status for Alberta and PEI,
However this update has apparently not properly cascaded down into the associated observation record(s) which still show the obscured marker. Whether this is an indexing failure or a cascading update failure or otherwise I’m not sure.
Sorry to be pedantic about it, but we’ve been asked to try and review what the impact of the changes is, but the queries dont seem to provide an accurate accounting of it.
So is Ontario just not done going through this process or is this really the end result of it? That’s where a large quantity of canada’s inat observations are and I’m really hoping there is more to come here rather than inat deciding to let this outside entity obscure a bunch of common species without a given reason.
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As an Ontario iNat user, I’d also like to have this clarified. If the policy remains to obscure everything with a rank of S3 or lower that degrades the quality of the data for a lot of species, in order to protect a very small fraction that would actually be threatened by having their locations revealed. It would be much more sensible to unobscure everything except those species that actually need it.
I know the Ontario CDC staff are heavy users of iNat themselves, so hopefully this can be sorted out. Looking at @charlie 's Red Spruce, I wonder if the CDC database were updated to include all the Ontario records (many of which were IDed by CDC staff), if it might not get pushed up to S4 anyways.
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Trying to clarify the open questions here.
Obscured taxon geoprivacy kicks in with any identification of a taxon with obscured taxon geoprivacy. This ensures that someone can’t just add a disagreeing coarse identification to change the observation taxon and unobscure the location, for example. This is why there are some obscured observations:
This likely means that there are some species showing up on the list due to this scenario of one maverick ID with obscured taxon geoprivacy impacting an observation.
For the Herring Gull situation:
@cmcheatle you are correct; they just needed to be re-indexed. If you ever suspect this (and it happens occasionally), select something in the DQA (I also undo it), then reload the observation. For the Herring Gull observations, all of the maps updated to show the true location, in keeping with the open taxon privacy designation. Since it was just a handful of records, I did this manually for all of them. If anyone comes across a larger batch, we can trigger a reindexing of the taxon.
This is the current end result of the approach the Ontario CDC decided to take.
In places where we have formalized relationships, I think it generally makes sense for iNaturalist to work with relevant, local organizations to take the lead on what should be obscured. However, it is far from clear how best to go about that. We’re trying it in Canada by starting with provincial-level decisions that can be changed with input from the community (and can technically be changed by curators). Most provinces opted to unobscure more species, but Ontario (which also has more than half of Canada’s observations) is still obscuring extensively.
iNat staff are not in a position to manage these kinds of decisions at scale, so it makes sense to connect the knowledgable users and curators with the CDCs to work together to refine the obscuration list.
At this time, we do not have any sophisticated infrastructure to facilitate such a dialogue or concise expression of opinion. @cmcheatle proposed a possible ‘voting’ approach that could be further developed to make the process more community-driven. I’m interested in further conversation in that thread on the topic of how to improve the infrastructure for this in the future.
For the time being, the tools we have are basically words and spreadsheets, so let’s figure out how to do the best we can with what we have to work with. Do folks think it would be helpful to start a wiki in this thread where you compile a list of species you propose should be unobscured? Or are folks already making those separately elsewhere?
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