Making your observations matter
Dear all-
It’s coming up to that time of year where we’re all excited to be outside as much as possible. We’re aiming for a big year on the BC Parks iNaturalist project: can we get to 500,000 observations of 10,000 species?
BC Parks iNaturalist data are fast becoming one of the largest and most valuable sources of biodiversity information in BC, and it’s all due to your great work in uploading your observations of nature :) . Get out there, stay safe and healthy, and have fun!
There have been some questions about the relative benefits of iNaturalist.ca (preferred) and iNaturalist.org. We hope to answer these below:
o We recommend that all Canadian iNaturalist users set their account settings to use iNaturalist.ca. Simply go to your account settings in the app or on the website and choose iNaturalist.ca for your affiliation. Your observations will still be fully connected and visible to the global iNaturalist community, and your username and password won’t change. The iNaturalist.ca site is supported by the Canadian Wildlife Federation, which has signed an agreement with iNaturalist to promote local use and benefit local biodiversity. The CWF has access to true coordinates of observations from Canada, which are automatically obscured from public view to protect species considered susceptible to harm (including direct/indirect harassment or collection). The operators of the iNaturalist.ca site will have access to your email address (only to communicate with you about site activities).
Should I obscure my observation if it’s a species that may be subject to harm?
o The iNaturalist.ca partners have spent a lot of time working to create a list of species susceptible to harm. These species locations are obscured automatically and you don't need to do anything further when you upload an observation. Provincial and Territorial Conservation Data Centres would like to have access to all observation data for their species assessments. If you manually obscure an observation, they do not have access to the true coordinates. They therefore recommend against obscuring locations manually if possible. If the observation is at your house and you want that location to be private, you can enlarge the bubble around the location dot, so it won’t be obvious where you live. There are very few examples of species being harmed after locations have been posted on iNaturalist, thanks partly to the automatic obscuring mechanism for species that could be subject to harm or collection.
Here’s wishing you all a wonderful year outdoors!
Brian Starzomski (@bstarzomski) and John Reynolds (@johndreynolds )
