Recently I’ve been employed to undertake field work as part of my job. The location where the work takes place is pretty undocumented and there little to no observation on iNaturalist or other citizen science projects for this area. Would publishing observations registered during fieldwork be considered a breach of confidentiality?
To be clear, I’m not sharing the data that I’ve been hired to collect, just posting observations that I personally registered, it just happens that I did it while working in the field and some of these observation pertain to species that are object of study,
I want to improve the reach of these citizen science projects but I also don’t want to incur any legal troubles
This isn’t a question the forum can answer as it depends entirely on the job. I’ve had jobs where I was free to share observations and others where I was not.
If your employer is open to the idea but has some concerns like privacy or trespassing, you could offer to use Obscured Geoprivacy on each observation you post from the site.
What does your contract of employment say? If you haven’t signed up to keeping wildlife observations confidential or to giving the intellectual property rights to your employer, I doubt you would be breaking any laws by posting them on iNaturalist. However, it isn’t necessarily a good idea to put them on iNaturalist. You don’t say what sort of fieldwork you are carrying out. If your employer is paying you to work on other people’s private property, posting on iNaturalist could annoy the land owners and if they complain to your employer, that could go badly for you wrt future work.