Mushroom Atlas and Observation Accuracy
One of the common questions I receive is 'why is my observation not counting towards the Atlas square?'.
To count towards an Atlas square, observations are filtered by requiring a species level research grade and an accuracy of <500m. The answer to the above question is almost always that accuracy setting for the observation is >500m, obscured, or not set.
Each of us uses iNaturalist in a different way, so the best practice will be different based on your use. I personally prefer to take a lot of pictures while I am hiking and not worry about entering observations until I get home. To facilitate this I have my phone record location information with each photo by adding location permissions to the camera app. It is important to make sure high accuracy, or record accuracy (depending on device) is also turned on, or it will not enter an accuracy value.
Without a bit of extra effort the accuracy of a location attached to your photo can vary greatly. This is because when you take the picture the device will record the best location it has at that point in time. If the GPS is still asleep or hasn't calculated a location yet, it could try triangulating with cell towers or just give the location of the tower you are connecting to, so you may get 6m accuracy or 50km. To combat this I use the Avenza app (free) to run a track in the background when I am hiking. This keeps the GPS awake the entire time and a consistent <10m accuracy on my recorded locations. I have read others put the phone into airplane mode, which then will only let it get a GPS location (I haven't tested this). Others will keep google open, and just go to it before taking a picture to make sure its showing your location first.
Ultimately the most important step, regardless of your process, is checking your observation before you submit it by clicking on the location box and adjusting it as needed.
In spite of my best efforts I received a message that one of my observations had poor accuracy, which I fixed, but I was wondering how many others were also not set correctly. While there is no accuracy filter in the user interface, there is a trick to see how many of your observations may have poor accuracy details. Browse to your observations on iNaturalist, and then at the end of the URL you can add: &acc=false or &acc_above=499 to the URL and it will filter your observations to false (observations that are obscured or have no accuracy recorded) or above 499m. Here are my URLs, you can replace my username with yours:
https://inaturalist.ca/observations?place_id=any&user_id=ksanderson&acc=false
https://inaturalist.ca/observations?place_id=any&user_id=ksanderson&acc_above=499
This let me go through and edit the observations to fix the location and/or accuracy.
Something for us to do during the cold of winter :)
