What do iNat staff think about the idea of automatically adding an elevation field to records when they are created or edited? I’m thinking this would be a lightweight call to Macrostrat’s API. iNat would send the lat, long and maybe uncertainty radius to Macrostrat, which would return the elevation (and maybe a vertical uncertainty figure). Those one or two numbers would be stored in the iNat record and recalculated in the event of an edit.
The big benefit would be that Explore and Identify could use elevation as a parameter. That’s helpful in terms of Identify searches, especially in areas with variable topography. Western North America, the Andes, Alps and Himalaya are all areas where elevation range is big part of habitat suitability. And storing that data in iNat records would allow it to be graphed and reported like the phenology graphs do today.
I understand that there’s a big jump from “We can look up elevation via the UI” to “We added elevation data to 140m observations”, so it would be totally reasonable to progressively add in that data through whatever process is most efficient and only surface this to users once the data exists to back it up. But it does seems like a huge amount of value could be added through the addition of 140 million two- or four-byte integer fields.
Edited to add: Of course, private and obscured records should be excluded, and existing elevation data should be restricted if an observation is made private or obscured.