Our most important observations are being obscured!

Gentle Colleagues,

If you have any SDC observations of Endangered, Threatened, or Vulnerable species, they may be being left out of our observation list, and I need your help to fix that. This is because iNaturalist automatically obscures the locations of many special status taxa. Observations taken within SDC boundaries, but with obscured location, won't show up on our location-based project. This is a problem many iNaturalist users are currently having, and there are multiple discussions of this raging on the iNaturalist Forum right now.

The fix for the moment is to start a second, non-location based project, and contribute individual key observations to it. Only the person who took an observation can contribute it to a project. So, I'd like to ask you to check if you have any "threatened" observations from within the SDC borders.

Please do the following:

1. Open an iNaturalist.org tab and click "Your observations"
2. Click on "Filters" in the upper right hand corner and check the box that says "threatened." And hit "Update Search."
3. Scan through the resulting observations for anything that isn't a Coast Redwood, Water Fern, Double Crested Cormorant, or Cooper's Hawk (these four count as threatened but aren't obscured). Anything else on that list is being obscured and left off our project.
4. If you discover that any of your observations are being left off, please let me know and I will show you how to contribute them to this project: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/sonoma-developmental-center-contributed-observations. Once they are contributed there, we will be able to see their locations and keep track of them appropriately.

Thank you, and sorry for the trouble.

Dan

P.S. This same problem applies to any location based iNaturalist project, including the one I set up for Sugarloaf Ridge State Park.

Posted on 27 de março de 2019, 04:48 AM by dlevitis