obscure location of orchids and other plants at risk

[phidippu...@gmail.com]

Hi,

I found this topic on poaching orchids and cacti discussed:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/inaturalist/PyNIBpQdc10/1FyEKvmEAwAJ;context-place=forum/inaturalist

and actually I feel the developers should at least respond to the issues raised there. I completely share the concerns of poaching danger in these taxa and also would like to hear if the issue of obscured observations being able to be localized by checking other iNat-entries of the same user at the same day has been considered dealing with.

Furthermore, I noticed that for orchid species which are not endangered on a global scale (LC), but are on Red Lists in various European countries, this status does not show up on the species data sheet in iNat and are therefore not protected (automatic obscured location). E.g. the Lady's Slipper orchid was virtually extinct in Britain with reintroduction programs underway now, but no protection is provided by iNat.

Do the curators have to enter the Red List status of every species in every country manually? Can't this process not be automated?

And while some orchid species might not even be endangered in a whole country, it can still be a rare floristic element in a certain region or landscape, facing the risk of being extirpated in this area by collectors.
I am voting for an automatic protection for every orchid species, as I consider the value of protection higher than a certain degree of data loss. Maybe there can be certain radius of obscurity (like 1 km), that the observation can still be used for biodiversity assessments for a region.

[Charlie Hohn]

The devs and many others have dicussed geoprivacy in a bunch of threads, not just that one. It's one of the most common topics on here. If you search geoprivacy you can see more of the threads.

There are a ton of really common orchid species. we even have an invasive orchid species in Vermont. Unfortunately there's no magic bullet. If a species (or all of a genus) has known or likely collection risk, we should auto obscure, but obscuring a whole family (!) is way overkill imho especially when it will obscure invasive species.

Obscuring to 'only' 1 km instead of 10 won't really make any difference. The location is still lost.  As far as I'm concerned once you get past 100m or something it isn't too useful at all. But for other taxa, location doesn't matter as much - for instance wide-ranging animals. 

You don't have to se obscuring for every county, if the species is globally at risk you can obscure it everywhere. But we should have a discussion somewhere if you are deciding to obscure things that don't have a documented conservation status. There are cases it makes sense, but it should be discussed and not done unilaterally. For instance the other day someone went and obscured all of white ash - a species that is very threatened by an introduced insect, but zero collection pressure and a lot of municipalities use iNat to keep track of their ash trees to watch for the beetle. So obscuring would do a lot of harm.

I too wish the 'same day' issue were dealt with, at bare minimum, if an observation is obscured the TIME should not be displayed. It's just not that important when compared with the problems it causes. If you really wanted to you could obscure date too but I think obscuring time would make a huge difference. 

[bouteloua]

"And while some orchid species might not even be endangered in a whole country, it can still be a rare floristic element in a certain region or landscape, facing the risk of being extirpated in this area by collectors."

Yes--my understanding is that a species need not be listed officially as threatened/endangered/etc to be given a conservation status on iNat for auto-obscuring if there is some other evidence to suggest it is at risk.

"Do the curators have to enter the Red List status of every species in every country manually? Can't this process not be automated?"

IUCN, NatureServe statuses, and custom lists like state T&E species, can be mass imported per ken-ichi's comment here. Might be good information to add to https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/geoprivacy and https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/curator+guide#geoprivacy because it can be hard to find information quickly on this Google Group. I don't know how frequently these imports are done. I assume the information is frequently updated in those outside sources.

"I am voting for an automatic protection for every orchid species"

I would vote against this for the same reasons charlie mentioned (there are common, disturbance-tolerant orchids [and cacti]). If there are certain species and locations that need curating, I'd recommend putting a call out for others to help curate or request importing of conservation statuses. I do think it might be good to obscure a certain genus or family when there are many members within the group that are poachable, e.g. in Vermont, obscure Cypripedium when IDed at the genus level, obscure Cypripedium reginae, obscure Cypripedium arietinum but don't obscure Cypripedium acaule (might not be the best example since my knowledge of Vermont orchid conservation is limited)

In addition to the time observed, the date/time submitted is still a really easy way to find the likely GPS location of an obscured/private observation when the user has other public observations in the same timeframe. For this reason, I, and a few other folks I know, will sometimes duplicate, remove the time observed, and then delete the original observation so that it no longer shows up sandwiched between public GPS observations. Or post them out of order if uploading from the desktop, or obscure everything from the whole day, even common species. Not perfect, and relies on the user to understand how the current system works, and often still reveals at least the preserve it was found in if you only went to one area that day.

I personally think both day and time observed and submitted should be fuzzy for certain rare and poached species, but not all of them. See Scott's response here.The lack of sufficient geoprivacy does still keep a lot of people I know from using the site when their data and other contributions to the community would otherwise be incredibly valuable. And it causes some people to upload false or inaccurate data so that they can list it but not put the population/individual at risk (e.g. don't include the time, list as being seen on the 1st of the month when it wasn't, put GPS pinpoint in center of county rather than true location).

Also note that you can always contact the admins directly at he...@inaturalist.org. They're usually quick with a reply and often a solution :)

cassi

[Scott Loarie]

Thanks all,

As Cassi mentioned, I made this issue https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/issues/678 over 2 years ago and didn't receive any specific feedback.

Based on this thread, sounds like there are proposals to:

1) obscure not just observed_on but also created_on?

2) obscure not just the time but also the date. By how much? To month?

Please be specific so I can update the issue and if there's consensus try to get it in the pipe.

-Scott

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[Charlie Hohn]

Scott, sorry i missed that when it was in github, but i don't follow that board quite as closely. In fact I just intentionally didn't add a rare species to iNat a few hours ago because of this issue.  I support the proposal to obscure time uploaded and observed for reasons mentioned here... would have said so if i had caught the post. :)  I think obscuring the time is most crucial... as for date, i know it makes it harder to use the 'newly observed' calendar feature, but i'd be ok with obscuring to month too. 

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[Eric Hunt]

Scott,

I would support obscuring location, time taken, and time uploaded.  I randomize both date taken and time uploaded of rare plants that I upload to Flickr, for instance.

I also agree that we should not auto-obscure all orchids (or an entire family, like Cactaceae) but use the regional rare plant lists.

Do we have a warning dialog box that appears when someone adds an observation of a threatened species to a project? I think Projects are a huge risk for "leaking" rare organisms.

Herbariums are bringing their collections online world-wide and many of them put their rare/risk of poaching accessions behind an academic wall - the public can't see them, but bona fide researchers can.

-Eric in Little Rock

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[Charlie Hohn]

Agreed about projects. They are a great tool for conservation organizations like Heritage programs to see real locations of rare plants... and for groups of friends to share their locations to trusted friends. (They will do that anyway so i don't think it's harmful to have that functionality here). However there are plenty of random extraneous projects, and i worry people will just share their observations by default.

One of the best things about iNat is that it isn't behind an academic wall. I also hvae heard stories of 'in group' people doing the poaching of plants. It's hard to find that balance. I got in an argument on Twitter about obscuring amphibians once with the guy who runs some amphibian citizen science page. He said everything should be obscured but 'trusted' people should be allowed to see the locations.  Who was the arbiter of who was 'trusted'? Why, him of course. Obviously an awful system. I also once witnessed a 'competing' site like iNat, now mostly defunct, have a curatorintentionally map things in the WRONG location because they didn't have good obscuring protocol. They mapped an albino moose into the ocean becuase they didn't want the location shared. First of all, curator violation of someone's observation, second of all BAD DATA! No!  iNat does a way better job, but we have work to do too of coures. That being said I think recruiting people to come here with our s ystem does way more good than not having a location sharing citizen science site because then people would just post somewhere else.

i really like how now if someone identifies something as rare and at risk of collection, it obscures even if the community ID doesn't have it listed as that. This way something can get obscured right away once it's identified. 

I do think that overzealous obscuring does more harm than good. For instance someone is obscuring monarchs in some places. Monarch outreach is integral in their conservation and i think obscuring them does more harm than good. Also edge of range species... if they aren't otherwise prone for collection they don't need obscuring. Good example is tulip tree is rare in vermont and a dominant species not far to our south. No one is gonna mess with them.

[jesse rorabaugh]

I would definitely support obscuring time to month. Anything less than that seems too easy to figure out locations from. Probably even put a random delay on posting for an hour to a day. That way order of upload does not make it clear for someone what observations were uploaded at the same time.

[James Bailey]

There's a point where it goes too far, though. I think obscuring time, day (not month) and the location is enough. Time of upload could be obscured, yeah. If anyone else organizes the observations with date uploaded, the obscured ones will go last on the list no matter when they were taken.

I'm not sure how to handle profile pages. For instance, you could see a rare obs sandwiched between two non-obscured ones and work out where the rare one was. But part of the fun is looking at what people have found, and going too far ruins that.

[Charlie Hohn]

It's a balance for sure. I don't think there's much point in doing it if we don't take them off the calendar though. I know it will never be perfect and that we shouldn't put super secret things on here. but if it's on the calendar it's the same as not obscuring date at all because it's literally on the calendar.  Maybe a monthly 'obscuredlife list first' list or something.

I'll be a little sad to lose the observations from my home property on the calendar, I admit. Those don't need time obscured, because i obscure all the stuff i see here.

[tony rebelo]

Obscuring the date is going too far!  The time is good enough.  

What will obscuring the date achieve other than to make it impossible to easily extract flowering times and variation in flowering (or growth) with climate change, region, rainfall events and so forth?

The issue is that people can use other observations to work out more precise localities using the time stamp.   Without the time stamp the entire day's observations are made secure.  It is not possible to ascertain where during the day the observers were.   People only visiting a single site can elect to obscure their other records if they suspect it will help work out a locality.  There are many ethical solutions to the problem of a small site - the easiest of which is to add a few extra observations en route and back again to prevent simple deduction.

Note that the time is irrelevant if only a single observation was made for the day.

For plants or animals that are only active at a certain time, some measure of time should be provided in the notes.

Note that it is not only the time.  

* The original file name is also a clue, and there may be other features in the exif that will allow working out the locality.

* Similarly habitat shots, and even habit shots can also reveal or narrow down, or even lead one to a precise location. Other species present in the pictures also allow cross-referencing.

Someone mentioned time of accession: that is irrelevant.   On the other hand, why is the time of day important at all for accession.  Why not just give accession to the day (store the exact time, but display the day component only).  

Our advice in our CREW teams is to upload the common species for the day in a block, and the collectable species in a block, either before or after, no matter how many sites are visited on the day.

If hiding data had no consequences then by all means hide it.  But hiding data interferes with many useful activities in the conservation and monitoring sector.   Hiding the time is an acceptable evil.  Hiding the date compromises too many useful features to be justifiable.

Ta

T

(CREW - Custodians of Rare and Endangered Wildflowers: the citizen scientists monitoring South Africas  threatened and conservation concern species (of which there are 3374 in the Cape Flora alone) and who need data such as date for keeping tabs on flowering times, dates visited and other crucial information - see https://www.sanbi.org/biodiversity-science/state-biodiversity/biodiversity-monitoring-assessment/custodians-rare-and-endan and https://www.facebook.com/Custodians-of-Rare-and-Endangered-Wildflowers-CREW-167173663344071/ and https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/crew-site-sheet-s-afr and https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/redlist-s-afr)

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[Charlie Hohn]

For me time wouldn't be enough for some things. Sometimes i spend all day in one small wetland. I wouldn't be able to post those rare species.

Nothing is going to be perfect of course. But i'm in favor of month, not date. 

[tony rebelo]

Then dont post them.  Why compromise a lot of crucial data for a few rare localities?

or perhaps hide only the time for "Obscured" data (including "Sensitive Species" and IUCN threatened species)

and allow "Hidden" data to have the date obscured.

That might be a suitable compromise.

[johnnybirder]

Just adding my strong support for obscuring by date as well.

I often visit only one site a day. Several of these locations I visit hold species threatened by poaching which I report to iNat. I currently go through much effort to obscure ALL my observations at those locations to protect the sensitive species. Obscuring by date, both in the date observed and date uploaded category will make these efforts even more effective.

Tony, you are conflating two issues here. The first is the level of obscuring, and the second is the selection of taxa that need obscuration. This conflation causes confusion, and results in rather surprising statements such as "then don't post them". Please keep these topics separate to avoid further confusion. 

Johnny

[Calebcam]

I don't like the idea of obscuring the date to month. Especially in reptiles, it is very interesting to know when the breeding season occurs, when they lay eggs, and nesting sites. Observations can be very useful when the date is open, as it lets researchers like me know "at this date, the lizards were laying eggs " and "at this time, the lizards were basking", and etc. Obscuring to month is overboard in my opinion. Maybe a better thing would be to obscure to day, or week? 

Caleb

[Charlie Hohn]

Tony, with all due respect, it looks like you've never added an observation or ID to iNaturalist. Perhaps hang around and get a feel for the community before making these aggressive statements? Unless I am wrong and am just not seeing your account in which case I apologize. But it seems we have a recent influx of people with strong opinions here who don't really use inaturalist. If you're interested in becomign a new user that is awesome, but please take the time to get to know the community before making such strong statements.  In my opinion anyway.

[ja_c...@hotmail.com]

http://naturewatch.org.nz/users/383144

https://forum.ispotnature.org/u/tony_rebelo/

[johnnybirder]

I would also be in support of obscuring by a random 1, 2, 3 (whatever) day addition or subtraction. 

Charlie, there are many ways to contribute to iNat. For example, Tony has been great in helping the South African community settle in. He may not have added many observations, but he has greatly helped filling a void in especially plant expertise. 

J

[Mark Read]

Hello all, my apologies for coming in late to this discussion. I certainly don't plan to address everything here but instead wish to focus on just a couple of points. First when an observer decides to make an observation private (rather than obscurred by default or choice), I strongly feel that both the date and time of observation should also be made private. The observation is still fully available to chosen project curators (such as https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/nhic-rare-species-of-ontario) but we should respect the wish of the observer and keep it private and non-trackable by the public. I hadn't really thought about the upload date and time until reading through all this but perhaps that should be hidden too.

The next level (obscurring observations by default or choice) is more tricky. In my opinion, I feel that (and it appears to be a general concensus) that observation time should be obscurred (as a minimum). Personally, I would also be inclined to obscure the date too, though as you mention in an earlier post, I don't know how complicated this would be in terms of programming. Even if the date was off by a day, this would be a big help. However, depending on observer submissions, a day may not be enough to ultimately hide a location. I also understand that there may be an issue with 24-hour BioBlitzes. I've never set up a specific BioBlitz in iNaturalist but instead use my project to track BioBlitz data (using a date filter). Assuming they both work in the same way, with members submitting records, then full details are available to curators but still hidden to the public as per design.

Finally (and very slightly off-topic), if a member of the public or research community wishes for further details about obscurred taxon for their own purposes/research, they can always set up their own project and/or contact observers directly. With large-scale data, this would obviously be time-consuming but not out of the question. Obscurred taxon are obscurred for a reason and we should respect that. All my obscurred and 'tracked' observations go to the above project. If they (NHIC) wish to share it onwards that is fine with me (as explained in their terms and conditions). What I don't want is for a member of the public to be able to track down my observation to a specific location via date/time information. This date/time issue is possibly something the general user is unaware of, believing that when a threatened taxon is obscurred it truly is.

Regards,
Mark.

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[tony rebelo]

Charles: with due respect - I have added over 1000  observations so far!  And done over 1000 Identifications (and have many more unadded because the southern African dictionary is not loaded).  I suspect that iNatters have taught me a great deal about the site - enough for me to be able to plan two months of courses on using iSpot for the souuthern African community, especially the national projects CREW, SeaKeys and others (see https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/user/tonyrebelo for some projects that I am running).

Of course, that is insignificant compared to your 27 000 observations, but perhaps my 60 000 on iSpot does compare.

But thanks for your opinion!  However, three weeks on, I no longer consider myself a new user of iNaturalist!.  And as a member of the South African Sensitive Species Committee, and having been involved in Red Listing of southern African Proteaceae for over 25 years I do feel that perhaps I might have something to contribute on the issue.

And I ran my first citizen science project in 1992-2002 - The Protea Atlas Project, which based on the Banksia Atlas of Australia was quite an experiment in southern Africa.  In fact, many of my CS are busy in CREW now and have come over from iSpot to iNaturalist to - we are quite a vibrant community.  

I dont know what else I might have to say or do to sway your opinion.  But I do have a member of the Proteaceae named after me - how many do you have?

[tony rebelo]

Obscuring all orchids is pointless.  Only those threatened by collecting should be obscured.  Many are under no threat of collecting, but heavily under threat of habitat transformation and aliens.  There localities need to be known for them to be protected and not hidden.  Furthermore, only those strongly threatened by collecting should be obscured: those with odd an casual collecting are better made known.

What I hear below worries me immensely.   There seems to be a naivety about collectors.   My experience is that most reputable societies have been "infiltrated", not necessarily by criminals, but at least by informants, and 'secret' information is not secret at all.   Similarly, who controls who has access to projects and their curators and managers?    It is trivial to set up a project on iNat and glean locality information: who is vetting project administrators and managers/curators to ensure that they are not part of the syndicates?

Ninety percent of the time the only people really inconvenienced by hiding information is those who need it in a hurry and daily to plan trips, monitoring and surveys.  Anyone with a little savvy can crack most hidden data.   Just the exif information on all these pictures allows easy data trawling: just look at it -  file name (sequential), date original, date taken, date saved,    not to mention sometimes coordinates, altitude, and lots of other information that can be used.

And then there are the pictures: habit and habitat shots often allow one to backtrack to the exact locality (in fact, are used to take repeat photographs from pictures over 100 years ago), other species in the picture offer clues, not to mention soils, water and other hints.

Clearly, no one here is thinking like a poacher!  To really hide the locality, you need to not put on the observation in the first place.

It is interesting to parallel this debate with that on iSpot 5 years ago (orchids also featured prominently, and I swear some of those most vociferous were those I would trust the least).  But on iSpot the major concern was the interval between posting and identification - although only 4 hours on average, iSpotters were paranoid that poachers would use that window period to extract all the data they wanted.  Some iSpotters deliberated misidentified their plants as threatened species on posting just in case.

Hiding data completely is impossible. And it has costs.  In the worst case scenario it gives the data to the poachers and prevents the monitors, law enforcers and conservation officials from knowing that their plants/animals have vanished under their noses.  (of course, it could just have been the porcupines or alien boars)

ta

T

[Charlie Hohn]

I've got about sixty plant species named after me including sugar maple because my middle name is sugar. I am actually Charles Sugar Darwin, aka Charles Darwin, and was given a time machine by Nikola Tesla which I use to travel forward in time to add data to this website.  But seriously. I appreciate your contributions to biodiversity research but I don't know how to be clearer: name dropping, species dropping, PhD dropping, etc, just aren't weighed the same way in our community that they apparently were in iSpot. You will sway my opinion by being a respectful and helpful and productive member of the community, not by getting plants named after you. If you want more positive response here, you will have to accept that. otherwise I fear your comments will continue to not be given full consideration by the community. 

[tony rebelo]

Oh. I forgot.  When we had this debate on iSpot, some users were upset that changing their exif to obscure localities and related data was in contradiction of the copyright options that they had agreed to in the "legal' terms.  Although to be truthful, most users did not even know that there was exif (what?) on their pictures.

T

[Tony Iwane]

Mark, thank you for your contribution to the thread. 

Charlie and Tony, please stay focused on the thread itself and not getting caught up in any personal stuff. Sometimes you just have to let it go. Our Community Guidelines may not officially apply here, but I think "You don't have to have the last word. Sometimes differences cannot be resolved. Learn to recognize when this has happened and resist the urge to reply if you have nothing constructive to add to a conversation." is good advice to follow. 

This is clearly a topic that brings up a lot of passion, let's stick to it and come up with a solution that will address, at least in some way, the issue at hand. Scott asked for specific ideas a month ago and quite a few people have shared their opinion, which is great. Not everyone's going to be happy with whatever decision is finally made, but you've all made your case, which is the purpose of a forum like this.

Tony

[Mike Burrell]

I'd just like to add another "+1" to basically everything that Mark Read said in his post. In particular, that if a record has its coordinates obscured, it really needs the date obscured too - without doing that it would take about 2 seconds to narrow down where something was. My vote would be to randomize the day within the month it was observed in, as this would preserve the seasonality charts that are particularly useful for some taxa. Someone could likely do a proper analysis, but I suspect that randomizing just to day or week would still allow a pretty high % of records to be determined pretty accurately (e.g. if a user only usually submits records once per week, then obscuring to the week would show they only submitted on the Friday that week and on the Friday they were only submitting other records from a particular reserve). I think randomizing within the month is a good balance of preserving some of the useful data while making it sufficiently hard to determine the actual day (and by extension potentially the location).

Mike Burrell

[swhit...@yahoo.com]

If I can make a suggestion, what about obscuring the date for plants but not animals? Researchers might not care as much about knowing the specific date when a plant was observed, because presumably the plant is there all year (even when dormant). However, knowing the specific date is very important to those of us who study insects and are tracking changes in early/ late flight periods due to climate change. Also, generally speaking, plants are probably more vulnerable to poachers, since an animal is less likely to remain in the same spot.

[Charlie Hohn]

Getting back to the topic at hand... someone has now added the status for Black Ash and had it obscuring everywhere. This is a tree that is threatened by an invasive insect; furthermore, precise mapping of populations is crucial and there's no chance of poaching. The tree is fairly common until the bug comes, then it's gone. Mapping is essential for planning and future restoration. As we've talked about in the past for widespread trees like this, i turned off the global obscure. That takes care of Vermont. However, there are many state and province level units where it is obscured... is it OK to turn them off too? Is there someone to talk to for each area so we make sure they don't care or can we just assume this is absurd to obscure and go ahead and fix it? For insects I imagine not obscuring the date is probably fine. For plants time isn't needed and date can be useful but week or month is ok when it's just for obscured plants especially when phenology projects can get the true date.

In terms of obscuring date for animal vs plant i agree it isn't too important for a wide ranging mammal or an observation of a flying bird or something. However it would be important for a bird nest, a rattlesnake den (though i just don't post rattlers at ALL where they are in peril), etc.