My first eye-opening moment working within the government was with team of herpetologists at the state conservation agency. They had a pretty slick public education campaign around protecting Gopher Tortoise habitats and a grand call-to-action "let the agency know where and when they see their nests". The whole thing fell apart because they were getting tons of earnestly-submitted junk data from earnestly-engaged citizens. Turns out the application was just a form that they asked people to fill out. I suggested they ask for user photos and scrape the EXIF data or ask them to opt-into sending their location and got laughed out of the room. Turns out that they discovered users immediately nope out of government websites that ask for their location! What a shame.

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MostlyStable 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A colleague of mine tried doing this after a large sturgeon die off in the San Francisco Bay a few years ago. Citizens were asked to upload photos of dead sturgeon washed up on beaches. They actually got pretty good data (sturgeon are very easily identifiable) and lots of participation, but the location data ending up being largely useless because it was fuzzed (I think by iOS?) to a large enough degree to no longer be helpful, and the fields for manual coordinate entry had very low usage

	▲	Shalomboy an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Oh that's fascinating. I hadn't considered OS-level fuzzing as a hurdle until now. I'm an pixel guy and typically I get decently-accurate location heatmaps in the Photos app when I search by location; I wonder how we would have handled this. HABs are so difficult, they break my heart.
	▲	Barbing an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		How does iOS decide whether to default to including location? I coulda sworn, even in earlier versions of iOS 26, if you told it not to include location when sending a photo once then it would not include it by default the next time. Also I thought that when you uploaded a photo from your camera roll to the web I thought it defaulted to no location. And that seems to have changed too. (Of course, you can still tap a button to withhold location EXIF.)

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smelendez 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder if there would be any way to fix this with the right messaging. With infinite funding and the right agency cooperation, I bet you could include this in a state parks app that you could also use for other useful purposes, like pulling up trail maps, paying for parking and camping, fishing licensing, signing up for volunteer events, receiving notifications with news around particular parks you frequent, etc.

But in the real world, if you put a QR code at the trailhead and said "take a picture of this code. When you see a tortoise nest, use the code to go to our website and share your exact location."

If people are wary of sharing their location with the conservation agency, you might have better luck if the website was run by a nongovernmental conservation group?

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latexr 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> earnestly-submitted junk data from earnestly-engaged citizens.

What made the data junk? Were the provided coordinates not precise enough, incorrect, something else?

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Shalomboy an hour ago | parent [-]

Well that's just it - in most of the submissions the coordinates weren't supplied at all, and when any location information was given it would come down to just a city name or a park name. They're trying to pipe these results into ArcGIS to inform park rangers where to reroute trails, public works departments where to survey before digging, and real estate developers which lots need proper relocation assistance before building on. They were depending on the average citizen to know how to fill out a technical field in this form and to do so accurately, and without and form validation. The whole project needed re-thinking.

	▲	mapmeld an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Sounds like a combination of 'can it be geocoded?' and 'is their location precise enough?' There is some progress on resolving human-written locations in cities ( https://www.danvk.org/2026/03/08/oldnyc-updates.html ) but I imagine once you lose reference points, '100 feet into Golden Gate Park...' would be interpretable but not possible to fix to one point.

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raw_anon_1111 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Really? You don’t understand why people wouldn’t want to share their location with the government?

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AlexandrB an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

iNaturalist is great for stuff like this as it allows organizations to create projects for data collection on specific species.

	▲	mapmeld an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I've also noticed that iNaturalist also fuzzes exact locations for some species within a geographic grid (example: zebra) even the ranch zebra in San Simeon, California.