Deobscuring Australian species (IUCN statuses)

As many of you would know, there are many Australian species on iNat that have their locations automatically obscured; at time of writing, the total number of species is ~2,800.

As a brief aside, the 'true' number is actually a bit lower than that, possibly several hundred lower. This seems oddly vague/inaccurate, but it's due to a mechanism on iNat to prevent bad actors unobscuring individual observations. Consider the following situation:
Someone uploads an observation of something with a sensitive location, it gets rightfully obscured. Three bad actors come along and each intentionally misidentify the observation as a common, unobscured species, eg a feral pigeon. The overall ID now shifts to said common species, and so the location gets unobscured, and they can access the sensitive location.
To combat this behaviour, iNat is setup so that if an ID of a sensitive species is added to an observation at any time, even if it is wrong + overruled or later withdrawn, the observation will remain obscured as a safeguard. So at least some of the species being included in that 2,800 is not because the actual species itself is obscured for Australia, but rather because there is at least one individual observation with at least one wrong ID (but now corrected) of an obscured species from somewhere else in the world. A classic example is the sulphur-crested cockatoo. Currently, 41 observations of this species are being automatically obscured in Australia. This is not because this species has any obscuration applied whatsoever, but because, on each of these observations, someone mistakenly added an ID of yellow-crested cockatoo (a threatened species from Southeast Asia obscured on iNat). All of these observations have since been correctly identified, but that initial wrong ID still applies obscuration.

But even accounting for that, take home message is that a lot of species are currently being obscured in iNat within Australia. Whilst many of these are being obscured based on state or federal sensitive species lists, there are also many that are being obscured only because of IUCN-based statuses. In many cases, these statuses do not correspond at all to Australian state or federal statuses as our conservation bodies/instruments and the IUCN apply different methodologies. On top of that, a lot of species being obscured due to IUCN statuses shouldn't actually have hidden locations, eg there are some Western Australian plant species that have an IUCN status of Near Threatened or Vulnerable despite being quite common and widespread, and having no federal or state status.

There has to be a reason for obscuring locations. If a species is threatened by collection, poaching, etc., then absolutely obscuration is a useful tool and will be implemented. But for other species, the threats are completely unrelated to these factors. For some species, the threats are clearing of habitat due to urban development, stochastic events such as fires due to small population size, increasing temperatures or sea levels due to climate change, etc. So obscuring the locations would not actually ameliorate any of these threats, as they are entirely unrelated to whether locations are public or not. Indeed in cases like these, it would almost certainly actually be detrimental to the species to obscure its locations on iNat. Consider a situation where eg a block of bush is being cleared for a housing development. Someone finds a species there and uploads an observation to iNat, but the location gets obscured, and by the time someone gets around to getting access to the true location, the vegetation has been cleared because no-one knew it was there due to the obscuration.

So obscuration should always be justified. As the main part of my job at the ALA, I'm working with iNat data on both the iNat and ALA ends. Under the National Framework for Restricted Access Species Data, we're trying to act consistently with the framework and make iNaturalist consistent with the state and territory sensitivity lists. So over the next few weeks, I will be opening the locations for all species on iNat where Australian observations are being automatically obscured due to an IUCN status only. Some of you may have noticed I have already done this for a small handful of species, mostly Tasmania stuff (see https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/thebeachcomber/86826-deobscuring-tasmanian-species).

As a few extra points of clarification:

1 . Perhaps the most important point here is to clarify how obscuration works on iNat just for the benefit of those who aren't completely familiar with the process.

a) When an observation is obscured on iNat, the true coordinates entered by the observer are randomly scrambled into a ~500 sq. km box around them. Any other user viewing that record will see the randomly generated coordinates with a box around them; they know the true coordinates are somewhere inside that box, but not the actual location. In addition to the coordinates, the date and time are also removed from the observation, so that only the month and year are displayed. Further, any identifications added to the record will have their timestamp altered to also only show the month and year.
b) When these records get exported to the ALA each week, the obscuration accompanies them, so the records are also obscured in the ALA, ie the coordinates shown in the ALA are the randomly generated ones, and the coordinate uncertainty is listed as somewhere around 29,000-30,000 m.
c) There are many different channels for getting access to the true coordinates if you're a researcher, land manager etc. I won't list them all here, but they include having users 'trust' you on iNat (can be turned on in profile settings) or directly requesting the data from the ALA (the true coordinates do go into the ALA, it's just that they are not made publicly available). So locations of obscured records are by no means lost, just more difficult to access. Also, when updates to coordinates/obscuration are made on iNat, these changes are automatically reflected in the ALA after a week or so.
d) There are two different types of obscuration on iNat.
i . Geoprivacy refers to users manually obscuring their own records. This is done at an individual observation level.
ii . Taxon geoprivacy refers to the automatic obscuration of records by the system. This is done at a taxon level.

2 . Crucial point: any records that you have manually obscured have not been deobscured. This only applies to species that were getting automatically obscured by the system, and only those being affected by an IUCN status.

Posted on Δεκέμβριος 18, 2023 1027 ΠΜ by thebeachcomber