Why is there no red pin for where an American Black Bear showed up at NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, on June 20, 2014? It’s not as if this is an area where an endangered species is trying to be protected! Same for another American Black Bear that showed up at Violette’s Lock in Montgomery County, Maryland, on September 16, 2026.
According to natureserv, they are vulnerable, so their locations are obscured statewide in Maryland: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/41638-Ursus-americanus#status-tab
I don’t personally think that vulnerable species should be obscured by default, and this is a good example of the limitations of automatically obscuring so many taxa without any human review. You can legally hunt these things in Maryland, obscuring makes no sense.
Are there any observations for those dates? If noone uploaded a photo, then there’s nothing for the database to show.
It seems to me that if a species is vulnerable and local laws are allowing hunting, then iNaturalist is thoroughly right to obscure the location to protect the species from further harm.
If someone thinks the taxon should not be obscured somewhere, please flag the taxon on iNaturalist and have the discussion there.
I’m not making any judgement – this topic as mentioned should be continued elsewhere, but I wanted to point out that no one is saying something is necessarily right or wrong. Stuff like this isn’t black and white and any number of passionate points of view won’t change what is right or wrong, this is a wide encompassing difficult to review issue across all the obscured taxon. He was just pointing out that the obscuration seems counter-intuitive which is at the very least a valid point.