This is very cool. Convenient timing, too, because I’ve been diving into geology rabbit holes lately.
3 Likes
Fantastic! I have been adding the elevation to my own observations for years using either a GPS unit or more recently from the elevation recorded on the camera phone. I made a custom Observation Field in Inaturalist called “elevation (m):”. Then I manually enter the elevation so that is is shown on each observation page. I tested using Macrostrat for about 20 of my own observations in Latin America including Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, comparing against what I had recorded. Some were off by up to 100 meters but most of the readings in Macrostat were within just a few meters of the elevation I had recorded when taking the photos or from a GPS unit. I also review a lot of observations of Costaceae made by other people and I have had to enter the coordinates into Google Earth to get a rough idea of the elevation. Now it will be so much easier just to click on the Macrostat link!
4 Likes
That’s a bummer! Might be worth reaching out to Macrostrat and asking them about it.
By “small” I meant that technically I don’t think it was a heavy lift on our end, just adding some code to send to Macrostrat.
3 Likes
Access to things from Vietnam is always a bit of a hit or miss affair. If it’s not blocked, then the main internet cable connecting Vietnam to the rest of the world is ‘damaged’ (as they’re claiming now), but said ‘damage’ often conveniently happens around times of political ‘sensitivity’, and the excuses are sometimes hilarious… sharks attacking the cables being one of the more memorable ones from a few years back.
2 Likes
If you use the link be aware that you need to have ‘hardware acceleration’ active in your browser. It wasn’t in mine when I first opened the page. There are still issues if you have an old GPU but it does reduce the CPU load considerably if your GPU is active.
3 Likes
Oh, this is sooo nice! The altitude can change quite fast where I am, so it is a really nice feature.
3 Likes
exactly - had to install it as well and now my phone constantly reminds me that I am running out of storage 
I would find this to be very helpful on infrequent occasions—filtering observations by elevation isn’t something I want to do often, but on the occasions I do, the workflow involved in manually correlating observations with external elevation data is very inefficient.
From a pragmatic viewpoint, I think using the simplest implementation and putting an alert flag in the interface that links to something saying, “Here’s how we’re getting the elevation data. Estimating error isn’t feasible at the moment—there is error, but we don’t know how much. Caveat emptor!” would be perfectly reasonable. Maybe even assign every observation some default and very large uncertainty in data exports—something that would catch the eye of downstream data users enough to prompt them to check whether this is data they should be using. In other words, I think having data with these kinds of problems is fine if people are appropriately informed of the problems.
As mentioned above, I’ve encountered use cases where being able to filter by elevation would be very helpful, even if the elevation data were not at all reliable for serious downstream analysis—for instance, recently I was trying to aggregate all of my alpine observations in New Mexico to share with someone. In that context I don’t really care if it was at 12000 or 12500 feet because I could just filter for everything above 11000 feet and kick out the small number of non-alpine observations manually. And, for what it’s worth, most of these observations are associated with offline data that includes elevation from a meter-ish accuracy GPS—if I were doing anything more serious with elevation I’d be using that data or pulling it from the 1/3 arc-second USGS DEMs, there’s just not an efficient way for me to propagate that information to iNaturalist.
4 Likes
Also, for people interested in geologic maps for the US, NGMDB (ngmdb.usgs.gov) is another very useful resource, and probably a good complement to Macrostrat as the two are efficient for different things.
Thank you so much! Elevation is helpful for looking at altitude adaptations
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.