Specimens photographed under microscopes or at home after being taken from the wild don’t have to be marked “in captivity” by definition. If the location is set to where the sample was collected from the wild, it’s RG-eligible and shouldn’t be marked casual. See examples here: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#captive
Blockquote
Captive / cultivated (planted)
[…]
butterfly mounted in a display case and not appropriately marked with date and location of original collection
[…]
Wild
[…]
your museum/herbarium specimens that are appropriately marked with date and location of original collection
I do not argue the fact that many organisms can be identified (and photographed) in a lab. I argue the cases when the location of such observation is provided not in the site where it was collected, but in the site where it was photographed (home, lab, etc.). Example: I look at the photo of a fruitbody of Boletus edulis and see that the location for the OB is somewhere in a house located in a middle of a town. Or I look at an observation of a marine fish and see that the location is a campus of some university distanced about a hundred miles away from a sea coast. What is the value of such observations?
Sorry I must have misunderstood your reply to me as a disagreement. If the location on inaturalist is the location where it is photographed but not where it is collected that is an appropriate use of ‘inaccurate location’.
I have also seen a couple of cases where one person marked another’s location inaccurate because they simply did not believe the species could occur in the location recorded; this type of disagreement is pretty hard to deal with. In one case the person who objected had looked at the georeference info of the photo (taken in a darkroom), and decided to mark the location provided as inaccurate because it differed. As far as I can tell the observer had been following iNat guidance perfectly.
Mostly I conclude that as a user of the data its worth looking through the Casual collection for any set of observations that you care about. But yes please to following up with users on surprising behaviour that doesn’t fit site guidelines.
yes there is, the observation needs to be mapped to the location observed (if you aren’t sure use a larger uncertainty buffer). Things like a plant brought home need to be marked either mapped wrong or captive/cultivated. That is the policy for iNat.
If you are seeing this with no circle, it is possible you are being shown the random location for an obscured observation. Depending on which map you are looking at, or the zoom level, the obscuration rectangle doesn’t always show.
I think a lot of good points have been made here. Wouldn’t this be a non issue if users were forced to comment/explain why the disagreed? This would apply to most/all votes (date, location, Organism is wild, etc…) I came across a several observations marked casual because someone marked them inaccurate and there did not seem to be a logical reason. My 2 cents.
We’re saying the same thing here. I understand the observation should be recorded at the original site, but the photograph itself doesn’t have to be taken at that site. The Data Quality Assessment asks for “evidence of organism”, not “evidence of organism provided from the observation site”.
I misunderstood @jurga_li in her original comment. I thought that she meant if the photo was taken in a house, that automatically meant its location was in accurate. That was my mistake, but that was the point I was responding to :)
Please don’t vote no to “Location is accurate” if somewhere within the accuracy circle could be suitable.
Remember that iNaturalist observations record encounters with organisms at a time and place. Hopefully the obsever also provides evidence of that organism (which could be in situ photos, or could be microscope photos, or pinned specimens taken later.)
IMO, if someone collects a mushroom, takes it home, photographs it under a microscope, and posts the photos as an observation using the date, time, and location of where they photographed it at home, then it should be marked as not wild because that organism is not where it “wants” to be at that time and place.
The location of the home is accurate because that is where the observer encountered the organism at that date and time. You should only vote “No” for Location is Accurate if the accuracy circle of the observation’s location is clearly wrong - eg a wild rhinoceros in the middle of the Pacific Ocean or an in situ reef fish in the Gobi Desert.
I once had a bunch of my observations marked this way presumably because the location was indeed inaccurate…I had accidentally manually located terrestrial observations a hemisphere away in the middle of the ocean…but it was annoying and wasted some good observations, because they didnt leave a comment on them, at a period of a lot of big uploads I never realized they were lost, and so I didnt know they were missing until I stumbled on them one by one months later.
I have since found ways to search all my observations using appropriate Bounding Boxes, but still, leaving a comment to say Location had been flagged as inaccurate would have been minimum courtesy I think.
Really? The way I have been treating it is that flagging ‘location is inaccurate’ is pointing out a correctable flaw in data quality where the flag can be removed if the user makes a small change. On the other hand, ‘captive’ is not a flaw in data quality at all, it just appears on the same page for historical and interface reasons; the observation itself could very well be the best documented observation of that species on the entire site.
I agree with this. The logic seems backwards, and we wouldn’t be in this situation where we have to judge whether an observation is “casual” because of X but not because of Y if “captive” didn’t automatically mean “no community ID needed,” as has been requested time and time again.
If they change the location to where they collected it, the date and/or time might still be incorrect, if the date/time used for the observation comes from the photo. So most likely both location and date/time need to be changed either way before the “No” vote should be removed. The same parts of the observation need to be changed, but IMO it’s more accurate to say the organism is not wild than it is to say the location is inaccurate. That being said, I suppose there isn’t really a difference in utility, haha.
I would ask about both the location and date in a comment explaining the problem, but realistically for stuff like freshly harvested plants and fungi the vast majority of cases where the date is off by a few hours are never going to be noticed by anyone anyway (how would you tell if the users phone is in the right time zone? Or if the metadata didn’t save right and the user had to ballpark it?). Most of the cases where I’ve been suspicious of the time have been things like pinned insects, taxidermied heads, or a random spring ephemeral with an observation time suspiciously close to the upload time… in November.
Hmm, interesting, I have been working on a project as a volunteer to review locations of burning bush in MN to determine locations in wild areas. First I make sure the ID is correct . . . then I check to see if it is wild or cultivated . . . last if it is wild, they want the accuracy within 20m so that a researcher can actually find the darn thing and survey that area for other occurrences. That said I don’t just mark inaccurate willy nilly, I ask the observer to move the pin.
personally i’d prefer they are marked as mapped wrong. Captive-cultivated observations, at least of plants in the ground, do still have some value for various reasons whereas observations with an incorrect location don’t have much use to them and potentially create bad data.
I didnt respond to this earlier as it is off topic here, but since it has come in again in the thread: Marking as “Cultivated” an observation of a specimen found growing wild would destroy the accuracy value of an observation documenting the invasion, density and destructive habit of environmental weeds. When deciding how to mark my own obs I think about where and when etc it was growing, not whether I took a specimen elsewhere eg for better photographs or a closer look in better light.