So, what happens if you affiliate your account with a sub-set of iNat, like iNat Finland, iNat Canada, iNat New Zealand, etc?
Is there a way to associate with these sub-branches without specifically affiliating with them? I travel a lot and there are certain parts of the world I’d like to keep better informed of (these affiliated portions seem to offer benefits that the main iNat system does not), but I don’t want my iNat account to be set to those projects as a default, I want it to remain with the global iNat system.
Can you clarify just what it actually means to “affiliate your account” with a sub-branch and how that affects the user experience?
Pretty much what @carrieseltzer wrote here (Carrie or a site admin, please correct me if I’m wrong):
-True coordinates of observations that you have chosen to make obscured or private (via user-selected “geoprivacy”), if you have affiliated your account with iNaturalistFi.
So if you’re affiliated with iNatFi, made some observations in Finland and manually obscured or made them private, the folks running iNatFi will periodically have access to those coordinates.
If you make observations in Finland, are not affiliated with iNatFi, and those observations are obscured due to taxon geoprivacy (you don’t manually obscure or make them private) the true locations for those observation will be periodically available for the folks running iNatFi.
By affiliating with your local network site, you can receive updates about relevant iNaturalist-related news and events.
You might receive some communications from the folks running iNatFi if you are affiliated with it.
Otherwise it won’t really affect the user experience unless you use that network node as your main entry to iNat. iNatFi is in Finnish by default, has its own logo and color scheme, search results are restricted to Finland by default, etc.
This is also explained in the iNaturalist Network Affiliation in your Account Settings page, and if you want to dig deep, here’s more about running a network node: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/network-join
I get what the benefits are, that was clear, and those benefits are what led to the larger question.
What’s unclear is how affiliating your account with a regional iNat network affects your over-all account. Can I be affiliated with more than one regional iNat network, or if you affiliate with one does that change you over from your previous affiliation to a new affiliation?
Currently I’m affiliated with iNaturalist, if I chose to affiliate with iNat Finland does this change that, or am I then affiliated with both?
Looking over the “account settings” page the portion dealing with regional affiliations doesn’t clarify this, and there is a warning not to experiment with it if you have over 1000 observations. Nor does the “Network Join” page really clarify this question.
The phrase “change your affiliation” on the “Account Settings” page suggests that you remove your previous affiliation in favor of the new one, but that may just be unintentional phrasing.
EDIT:
And logging into iNat Finland results in a pop-up asking if you want to change affiliation from iNat to iNat Finland, further suggesting that it’s a one-or-the-other type choice and that you may not be able to affiliate with more than one iNat sub-region.
You can only have one site affiliation, so if you affiliated with iNatFi you would no longer be affiliated with iNaturalist. But you can always log in to and use any iNat network site with your account.
That’s too bad, for those of us who want to pay close attention to more than one affiliated area it would be nice to have the ability to be affiliate with more than one region/system at a time.