Wondering if is it possible to obscure geoprivacy of all Endemic species in Turkiye

Curators
1

Turkiye’s international obligations and domestic legislation establish a clear conservation framework that prioritizes endemic taxa and regulates the collection of wild biological material. Article 3(1) of the Bern Convention mandates that parties pay special attention to threatened and vulnerable species—“especially those that are endemic”—while Article 15 of the Convention on Biological Diversity recognizes national authority regarding access to genetic resources. Legislation in Türkiye regarding this matter is very strict; the rules are rigorous, and the penalties are extremely severe.

Turkish legislation also subjects the collection of plant genetic resources to a permitting process and explicitly prohibits the cutting or uprooting of rare and endemic plant species in protected wetlands without authorization. Furthermore, official guidelines issued by Turkiye’s nature conservation authority classify the unauthorized taking of biological material from wild organisms as an issue of biopiracy. Taken together, these provisions demonstrate that endemic taxa and wild biological resources in Türkiye are subject to special protection and access controls. Obscuring the precise coordinates of such species on iNaturalist—since revealing them could directly facilitate the locating and unauthorized collection of endemic taxa with limited geographic ranges—is a reasonable and proportionate conservation measure consistent with Turkiye’s domestic legislation and international obligations regarding biodiversity conservation. The primary concern here is the potential use of iNaturalist location data for such activities. Personally, I obscure the locations for all my observations, but many people are unaware of this issue. These concerns are particularly significant in light of the recent rise in enforcement cases—many of which have received extensive national media coverage—involving the illegal collection of endemic and protected species in Türkiye.

In September 2026, three individuals were fined over 2 million TL (35,680 euros) for illegally collecting Allium tuncelianum (Tunceli garlic), an endemic species restricted to a very limited area; just a few weeks prior, two foreign nationals caught collecting wild grasshoppers in Mount Nemrut National Park were fined approximately 1.4 million TL (over 24,000 euros). Similarly, other recent operations have resulted in heavy fines for unauthorized collection and biopiracy.

In this context, there is a legitimate concern that publicly accessible and highly precise location records on platforms like iNaturalist could—even if unintentionally—be used to pinpoint the locations of rare or geographically restricted endemic taxa for the purpose of collection. This concern is supported by some conservation studies demonstrating that publishing the exact locations of rare, range-restricted species can increase their vulnerability to collection, poaching, and other forms of disturbance; My primary concerns here center on the following points:

1- If iNaturalist location data were used in illegal collection or biopiracy cases, this could harm the reputation of citizen science in Türkiye, particularly in the eyes of conservation and law-enforcement authorities.

2- Türkiye is a country with an exceptionally high level of endemism, boasting over 3,000 endemic species.

3- Turkish domestic law contains extremely strict rules and substantial penalties.

Long story short;

Do you consider it appropriate—in terms of iNaturalist’s rules and general philosophy—to obscure the locations of all endemic species in compliance with Turkish national law?

Note: As English is not my native language, i used AI to fix grammar/vocabulary mistakes of the text.

2

One quirk with iNaturalist (and one that I think is quite harmful, but this isn’t the thread for that, and I don’t see it changing) is that taxon-level geoprivacy essentially makes that data prohibitively infeasible to acceess, even to scientists with a valid research request or reason. Unlike most citizen-science platforms, where sensitive data can still be accessed upon reasonable request from scientists, with iNaturalist, once a taxon gets obscured here, all that data is fully unavailable, even to staff (I believe some admin access is still possible but I’ve never heard of a use-case where it has been accessed), without individually asking each observer account to share obscured coordinates with you.

As such, I think blanket taxon-geoprivacy can be super harmful; you’d basically be putting up an almost insummountable barrier for researcher access to over 3,000 endemic species in one swoop (unless they’re willing to use the 500km2 obscured coordinates, which are useless for most research).

Personally (and I admit this is probably more fringe than a lot of users here, and the staff), I think until iNaturalist can sort its systems out so that obscured data can still be made available upon request, the blanket taxon geoprivacy should be more restricted than it currently is, and mostly for taxa that are known to be threatened by poaching or potentially iNaturalist-enabled overharvesting, think songbirds in Indonesia, a lot of Herp species or particularly high-value plants. For other species that are simply obscured because they are threatened by other means, I firmly believe that basically removing any high-quality citizen science data for them carte blanche causes a lot more harm than it helps prevent.

EDIT:
I edited the above to soften the language a bit. See the quotes below or edit history for the original text and/or some additional context.

3

I didnt know that it is irrecoverable. It made me think that my idea wouldn’t work right from the start.

4

Unrecoverable might be a bit harsh from me; the data still exists, but beyond being added as ‘trusted’ to a project, only the observer can see it. Some jurisdictions have a candidate affiliate network node that I believe receives the obscured coordinates and can respond to research requests. I know Australia and Canada both have organisations that can assist researchers. So one possible route would be to try and get something like this set up with a conservation organisation in Turkey that could allow more reasonable access.

But, short of that, this is quite a useful piece explaining the process and why Australia has gone through a curation process where the taxon-level geoprivacy is, in many cases, being deliberately reduced.

5

This,

and much of the rest of the comment, is incorrect. Staff can access the data, and there are numerous ways for users to share it (by trusting individual users/projects, sharing in messages, unobscuring later). Additionally iNat networks (e.g., iNat Australia, etc.) also have access to data with taxon geoprivacy in their purview. You may want to read the iNat Help page on geoprivacy which explains some of the errors above.

6

So let’s say this occured and all endemic Turkish species had taxon geoprivacy applied, if I was a researcher wanted to model Area of Habitat for a new round of IUCN listings on Turkish-endemic Dragonflies (for example), what would be the avenues availabe to get presence points?

Without an affiliate project or iNat network (that doesnt exist in Turkey), would I have to make a project adding the taxa and individually message all the observers asking them to ‘trust’ my project with obscured coordinates?

If other avenues exist in places without an iNat network or affiliate group, I’d love to know and love to be wrong. But my understanding is that there basically isn’t any way to contact admins and ask for an unobscured dump of a certain list of taxa for this purpose.

7

My main point is that for as long as there is no way for researchers to fill out a form with a reason for needing the data, what they plan to do with it and why, and then be provided with a dump of the specific taxon-obscured data they requested, adding blanket geoprivacy for groups of species, including ones not known to be threatened by poaching, does more harm than good and adds often unreasonable barriers for little gain.
And I think this is why countries or regions with more developed curation normally steer away from obscuring based purely on conservation status and instead do it on a per-taxon basis based on threats.

I fully understand that caution is good in a lot of these things, and I also fully understand why a blanket ‘anything threatened is obscured’ exists where there isn’t the curation capacity to do it more finely, but generally a more surgical approach to taxon-level obscuring is better whereever possible.

8

This is essentially correct to my understanding, but it is a very different situation to what was posted above.

This

is a valid approach that many organizations have used to get data that they want. See a good example here:

https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/maryland-biodiversity-project

9

To be frank, any system that puts the onus on researchers to individually reach out to the observer of every record they want and ask if they could please trust us with private locations (especially since this doesn’t separate record-level privacy from taxon geoprivacy?) is a failed system, in my fully honest opinion. Just because people have made the system work (particularly in the parts of the world with the most developed iNaturalist network and support), doesn’t make it good or even feasible more generally.

And with the number of inactive accounts, this also makes a very significant number of records completely inaccessible.

10

Even using that successful example Maryland project, barely 2% of the observers have actually joined the project (1,500 members vs 71,000 contributors), so even if every single person who joined it trusted it with obscured coordinates, only 2% of people who contributed are even in a position to share obscured coordinates. In a place like Maryland with incredible depth of data, multiple other sources ect that model might work, but in places like Turkey or really anywhere not in the highly-developed iNat regions, getting 2% of the data, where many taxa would have less than 50 observations, simply makes this model infeasible and essentially leads to data being unrecoverable.

11

In my own work with Ontario Butterflies, we used to have a lengthy list of “vulnerable” species that were automatically obscured. Basically, most of the interesting observations were obscured by default. Trying to contact individual observers to ask each of them to join our project and give us permission to see their coordinates was an ongoing nightmare (when you count the fact that they often needed coaching through several attempts before they got the settings correct). Because our Atlas project is reasonably well known, we probably had an above-average degree of cooperation from iNat users, but we still got only a fraction of observers opting in. The list of obscured species has since been vastly reduced - only a few butterfly species are currently obscured by default. Mostly, I don’t even bother contacting observers to ask them to opt in anymore - the obscured species are mostly confined to a handful of known locations, so the obscured observations don’t represent much in the way of significant information.

Because our project has already jumped through the hoops of getting a lot of data that would be otherwise obscured, as well as observations from other sources (including historical data), I get the impression that most researchers come to us for a curated dataset rather than bothering to try to harvest raw, uncurated data directly from iNat.

12

Setting aside for the moment the issue of accessing the location data, endemic does not equal rare. I’m sure some plants endemic to Turkey are also rare (listed endangered or threatened). Those should be obscured. The more common ones should not, even though they are endemic.

13

Are there any criteria to obscure all of the “rare” endemics?

14

In some places, species that have been classified as “endangered” or “threatened” in an area are automatically obscured in that area, if I understand correctly. I don’t know how that is set up.

15

I think that is coming from UN Redlist automatically. But plant red list of Turkiye is very old and not updating periodically.

16

I agree that blanket level obscuration of all endemic species to Turkiye isn’t warranted and wouldn’t meet iNat’s guidelines for obscuration.

In general, a taxon should only be obscured if there is a reasonable expectation that it “may be threatened by collection/harvesting or otherwise disturbed due to the public’s knowledge of its location.” That doesn’t seem to be what is being proposed here, so I think it’s a non-starter. If there are specific taxa that meet the criteria above and should be obscured, it would be best to raise a taxon flags on the specific taxa and include evidence for why they should be obscured.