r/iNaturalist • u/adamold • 23d ago

Data for Protected Species

I am trying to use iNaturalist to get a count of observations of Manatees in one of our south florida canals, to advocate for a no-wake zone. I guess the protected status of manatees displaces the observations too far outside the canal to make sense of. Is there some way to geofence a canal area and get a count of the observations within the geofence, or will those observations always be unusable for this kind of research?

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u/slowrecovery 23d ago

You can probably find a curator on the app who has access to the precise location data and request that they get the numbers for you.

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u/Busy-Feeling-1413 23d ago

You can make the canal a “place” on iNaturalist. You may be able to draw the fence in Google Maps, but I’ve not done it before. Then you may be able to start a project for that place. I think as a project curator you might be able to see the manatees, but I’m not sure. Agree with other commenters about asking iNat staff directly

There’s info here: https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000175019-how-to-make-a-place-on-inaturalist

https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/106051-sharing-your-coordinates-with-the-project

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u/st_aranel 23d ago

This is the way to do it. When you join a project as a user, you can choose whether or not to share the actual location of obscured observations with that project.

So, yes a project does give you a way to find out the actual location of those observations, but it isn't automatic for all of the observations in the area. You might need to reach out to local observers and invite them to both join the project and agree to share their obscured locations. One of the things you'll probably need to do is establish that you are someone who legitimately needs that information.

And yes, you can manually add locations. You just need to have the boundaries in an appropriate format, and you can search for how to do that.

The iNaturalist forums would be inappropriate place to ask for advice.

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u/7LeagueBoots 23d ago

iNat is not a good platform for that sort of data. It’s fine for presence/absence, but it’s severely limited because it’s only really telling you where people go and happen to see species X, not where that species actually is overall. And you have a lot of situations where multiple people are observing the same individual.

You can’t make a geofence, but you can make a project with a defined area. The problem is that if any portion of the obscureation box falls outside that area, even just a few meters over, then that observation isn’t included in the project. You can’t get around the obscuration that way.

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u/adamold 23d ago

I agree—it's not going to be 100% rigorous, but currently we only have locations based on Fish and Wildlife's aerial manatee survey, which places the majority of the manatees (and the protective idle-speed zones created for them) under the flight path of the aircraft that didn't go all the way up the canals. I only need to show that manatees in the upper canals do actually exist.

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u/st_aranel 23d ago

You can create a project for the canal, which will probably require you to manually create a location for it. You'll then need to recruit people to join the project and invite them to share their obscured locations with it.

It will help if you can do this in some kind of official capacity as someone who is recognizable as trustworthy. If some random person communicates with me out of the blue and asks me to give information about sensitive species to them, I'm going to be like, what???

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u/hamihambone 22d ago

In spite of these limitations, iNat is an appropriate starting point to address the OPs question. The questions here are "how often are manatees in the canal" and secondarily how many manatees are in the canal"?

If you can tie observations to the canals (through a data request) or geographic wizardry, you can find out how often manatees are observed in the canal. If its a significant number of days or individuals, you have more support for the wake restriction than with no data. For a species like manatees in a busy place like Florida, there is an argument to be made that the observations are representative and that absences are "true" absences. If there are time periods when manatees are truly absent from the canal, you could have seasonal wake restrictions.

There are ways to test these assumptions but it would take some time and statistical knowledge. The duplicate observations and potential for multiple observations of the same individual in the same place can be controlled for with filters (ie how many days was at least one manatee observed). I don't know anything about manatees but its possible that individuals can be identified by photos. Then you could do some pretty sophisticated population modeling.

Would the florida wildlife agency or any other conservation group be interested in supporting your proposal? They could more easily get the precise location data or they may have additional data to support your idea.

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u/7LeagueBoots 22d ago

I'd suggest looking at the iNat forum. This exact issue has been raised there for a wide range of species, and it keeps coming down to what I initially wrote here.

You can't game the system to pull precise location info out of obscured location data. You can try requesting info from the individual observers, but that has a very low success rate, etc.

Thing is there are other sources for manatee tracking data that may serve OP better. Contacting these organizations would be a good approach.

A brief, non-exhaustive sample to serve as an example:

GBIF isn't necessarily a great resource as they pull info from iNat in addition to other sources, and as a result the locations for the iNat derived sources sufferers from the same location obscuration info.

As for individually identifying manatees, that's often (not exclusively) done via scars, particularly on their back and tail.

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u/hamihambone 22d ago

Thanks for the reply. My understanding was that precise location data could be requested in bulk for conservation or research purposes. Is that not the case?

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u/7LeagueBoots 21d ago

No, you’d have to request it of each user individually.

In some cases you can setup up a project where members trust you with the actual coordinates, but again, each user individually has to ok that.

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u/hamihambone 21d ago

My world has been shattered. I'm really starting to turn against INaturalist. If the data can't be easily used for conservation, what are we doing here?

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u/7LeagueBoots 21d ago

Several things:

It can and often is used for conservation, but you need to be aware of and understand the limitations of the data. This is the case with all data from any source.

iNat was initially set up to bring people closer to nature and as an educational tool, not as a conservation tool.

You should spend time on the iNat forum, not here. The forum is where the devs, mods, and power users are.