Sometimes “_____ is not found here” is all someone needs. A lot of these happen because someone inexperienced didn’t realize that the species they picked was not the expected one for that location.
I agree that looking at range alone is not enough. I would not have gotten credit for helping to find Ohio’s first Roseate Tern if I just looked at the range!
And yet, birds tend to be easier than some other taxa, but still there are a great number of extremely similar-looking species that people just don’t bother to rule out most of the time. And most of the time, nobody seriously argues that they need to, because it just isn’t affecting the quality of the identifications on any noticeable scale. Rare vagrants are rare!
For example, snipes seen in Ohio can safely be assumed to be Wilson’s Snipes in the absence of any clear reason to think otherwise. Terns in Ohio can be safely assumed not to be Roseate Terns, although if you take that too far, you might end up being the guy who identified the bird before we did, but he said to himself “that can’t be a Roseate Tern in Ohio” and didn’t look at his photos until later in the evening. (True story.)
All of which is to say: It depends.
And, finally, I do have a few observations with ridiculously large uncertainty circles. Those are old observations, which I really wanted to identify (or just have a record of having seen), but I didn’t get accurate location data at the time because that was not really a thing. I hope this doesn’t annoy anyone too much.
(And yes, I will be talking about that tern forever.)
It is my experience in entomology that biological ranges, as well as some of them may be known to science, does not provide the limits for the actual biological range of the species. So many geographical locations are understudied. What I mean by this is: has the area actually researched in the field with specimens collected, identified, and housed an institutional or private collections? This is often not the case. One of the areas that I’m currently leading an arthropod biodiversity project is the Davis Mountains Preserve found in West Texas. It’s a sky Island area within the Chihuahua Desert, and it’s owned by The Nature Conservancy. This Preserve is found in one such area that has been incredibly understudied. We have collected several species, that were not previously known in the state of Texas. Several of these species have biological ranges limited to or a combination of other western states: California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Until these species were collected at the Preserve, in many cases were thought to be endemic to these other states. These results are what we actually anticipated. We have collected a Mirid, thought to be Endemic to Arizona. A Erotylid, and a Hydrophilid also formerly thought to be endemic to Arizona. A Ptinid, formerly endemic to California. There is a Carabid, that was only known from the Sacramento Mountains in New Mexico. This is just some of the examples that we have discovered. This shows, that if we were relying on known biological ranges for identification, significant errors would have been made.
As for this project which will continue through 2025, it will be published sometime after it’s completion.
I agree that especially in entomology we don’t usually have fine-tuned ranges figured out yet. But identifying by range is still useful on a broader level. Most entomologists are not looking to reject a species by range for just being a state or two away from a known record, we’re doing it on a continental scale. Every day I see dozens of observations in my focus group that have been posted with species or genera from the wrong continent, and those invariably have been safe to bump up when you look more closely at them.
Side note: hooray for doing this research! The Davis mountains seem like such a cool biodiversity island.
I disagree - downvoting “Location is accurate” based on the size of the accuracy circle is not a useful practice (in addition to going against iNat’s Guidelines) for at least two reasons.
Anyone using the data already has access to the size of the accuracy circle - it is in data exports from iNat, GBIF, and is visible on the observation page. The size of the circle is a continuous value - transforming that value to a binary measure (accurate/not accurate) leads to a loss of information. End users can make their own decisions about which values of “accuracy” (yes, I know it is more precision) are useful to them. The decision shouldn’t be made arbitrarily by a different user who has no connection to all uses of the observations. This is especially relevant since using the DQA may prevent export of observations to GBIF. Downvoting observations with large accuracy circles solely for that reason effectively reduces the availability of potentially useful observations to researchers.
There is no clear guideline for how large of an accuracy circle is so large that it is “inaccurate”. This practice would be applied inconsistently by individual voters, and even more inconsistently if it were done by multiple voters, each with different personal opinions on what accuracy circle counts as “inaccurate”. If a data user thinks that some observations are too inaccurate, they can easily apply their own filter on accuracy (the continuous variable, see point 1 above). While one data user may need observations accurate to 1 km, another may be able to use any observation they can be sure is in a state or even a given country. The only way to have a consistent application of which observations are accurate enough or not for each use is to let the end data user determine that for themselves via a consistent process.
In regards to the official iNat Help for the DQA field, it says:
“the community agrees the location doesn’t look accurate (e.g. monkeys in the middle of the ocean, captive/collected organisms observed inside a building but unlikely to have been found there naturally, etc.)”
Practically this means - is there a strong reason to believe it isn’t possible that the organism was found within the accuracy circle? (eg, the accuracy circle only includes land, but the photo is clearly of ocean; the accuracy circle only includes a building, but the photo was clearly taken outside). If it’s reasonable that the focal organism was found in the accuracy circle, then Location is accurate shouldn’t be downvoted.
