How to batch edit your observations to update to the correct location and date-time.

Once you've uploaded your observations using your mobile phones, you'll need to "batch edit" your observations on the iNat NZ website to update them to the correct locations and start date-time.

To do this, log in to the website and go to your observations. You can get to that page from your Dashboard (see the Observations tab) or click on your user icon on the top right of any page and select the "Edit observations" option). My observations are at https://inaturalist.nz/observations/jon_sullivan.

On the observations page, look for the "Batch edit" button. Tap that and you'll be able to select the observations you want to batch edit. Tick the box next to each observation then tap the "Edit selected" button.

This takes you to a page called "Edit a Batch of Observations". Click on the yellow bar called "Batch Operations" that opens up a panel of options. Here, you can set the date and time to "2020-02-28 3:00 PM" and be sure to make sure that the time zone is set to "(GMT+12:00) Wellington". You can also set the Latitude and Longitude to the GPS values from the spreadsheet you'll find on the course website. You can also open up the "More fields" option and add (or override) any observation fields you've missed, like setting the "Grassland or Forest" field.

Once you've made the updates, be sure to press the blue "Apply" buttons to apply your changes to all of your observations. Then, importantly, you need to scroll to the bottom and tap the blue "Save all" button to save all of your updates.

Make sense? Leave a comment if you want me to expand this out some more.

Posted on March 16, 2020 02:56 AM by jon_sullivan