I experimented with the download utility

I navigated to https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/export , selected Lorton, VA and downloaded the CSV. A few observations, so to speak:

1. I notice all but two of the entries were in the Eastern Time Zone. One was in Pacific (US and CA) and the other in Hawaii TZ. I checked the lat longs and they're correct for this area, so I'm pretty sure it's not a software bug. Also, both of the observers have other observations in the area, so I'm thinking maybe a camera was not reset or possibly they just entered it incorrectly. Not a big deal. But I did wonder if one of those was local. (I'm pretty sure it is.)
2. I notice the field "out of range." Most of the entries for this field are empty, but some are set to either "TRUE" or "FALSE". I wasn't sure what this meant - about a species found out of range? About something else? The one instance of TRUE was a "common garter snake" and I guess I didn't consider that out of range for this area.

I googled "common garter snake and came up with this: http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/62240/0
indicating it is really is "common" (that would be an unfortunate name otherwise) and has a wide distribution. Anyway, I clicked on the "Map" link there (upper left corner) and it brought up this:
http://maps.iucnredlist.org/map.html?id=62240
As expected, it displayed the distribution of the snake includes this area. So it's not clear why that comes up as "out of range." Maybe there is another of this information. It would kind of make sense that there would be multiple lists maintained by different groups that contain maybe some different data (for different purposes) and maybe a lot of overlap. One would hope the data included in both projects would be similar. But one never knows without understanding.

I googled "iNaturalist out of range" and came up with this unrelated site that explains some things: https://colombia.inaturalist.org/pages/help#range
I don't know if it's linked to from an iNat page.

Anyway, "out of range" makes sense. It's just that "Common Garter Snake" out of range is bugging me. I doubt I'll bring this up in the discussion forum. Those guys have enough real issues to worry about.

1. Someone i think might be a developer mentioned a video on his "work flow". I hope I can find time this weekend to watch that.

Posted on February 1, 2018 02:36 PM by elbillaf