Projektin Maryland Biodiversity Project Päiväkirja

Päiväkirja-arkisto kohteelle kesäkuu 2020

kesäkuu 30, 2020

Sharing obscured locations with MBP

Short

Please consider adding Maryland observations with obscured locations to the project "MBP Sensitive" - https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/mbp-sensitive. Maryland Biodiversity Project (MBP) is a biodiversity-focused non-profit that handles sensitive data with great care. We archive biodiversity data for posterity and share with appropriate stakeholders in the science and conservation community. The MBP web site only shows record details at the USGS quad level by default and only to county level for vulnerable species.

To share your coordinates, please complete the following easy steps: Go to the "MBP Sensitive" project and then "Your Membership". Under Settings, there's the item "Do you want to make your private/obscured observation coordinates visible to the project curators?" Please click "Yes, no matter who adds the observation to the project." Then anytime anyone adds something there, we can see the coordinates and map to the right county/quad (and have for research/conservation/posterity).

Details

iNaturalist supports at least two forms of geoprivacy. Record-level geoprivacy allows individuals to mark records as “obscured” or “private”. To protect sensitive species, iNaturalist also marks all records of certain taxa (i.e., endangered, S-ranked, vulnerable) with “obscured” geoprivacy via a “taxon_geoprivacy” field.

We have to go a bit technical for this paragraph. When records are obscured - whether at the record level or the taxon level - our MBP data ingest tool cannot see the precise locations. Based on our testing, the “obscured” coordinates can place the location outside of the actual quad, county, or even state. The state can be confirmed elsewhere, so our current approach is to ingest the record and media and map them at the state-level only with county and quad not populated.

So what can we do?

  • First, if/when comfortable with all details, including species / site sensitivity, you can remove the record-level geoprivacy and add records as “open”. This option is not available for taxon-level geoprivacy.
  • Add records to the MBP Sensitive project and grant curators permission to see the coordinates -
    https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/mbp-sensitive

Why two projects?

It came down to deciding whether we wanted to manually add every record or just have to add the sensitive records. Our main project is a collection project and automatically collects all MD records in iNaturalist (with some other basic rules). Unfortunately, the trade-off is that curators/managers of that project cannot see obscured coordinates. MBP Sensitive is a “traditional” project, which does allow observers to share coordinates with our curators. As noted above, MBP will archive any obscured coordinates for posterity and share with appropriate stakeholders in the science and conservation community. Our web site only shows record details at the USGS quad level by default and only to county level for vulnerable species.

Julkaistu kesäkuu 30, 2020 02:35 IP. käyttäjältä billhubick billhubick | 7 kommenttia | Jätä kommentti