Groundspeak Portal

Although I rarely do, I had to vote no on this category.  I'm not too hopeful that endangered wildlife might not be harrassed by those trying to satisfy the requirements of this one.  While I think it is of noble intent, from what I've read it encourages laymen who may know nothing of the delicacy of a particular species to enter it's environment to photograph these animals in their natural habitat which risks the unintentional destruction or profound disturbance of the habitat and/or it's inhabitants.  If it were strictly limited to Red List animals in legal captivity, I would be all for it.  I think as a responsible community, we should be careful with our vote on this one.  This category has the potential to do good if re-written.  But as it is written, it could initiate a whole new threat to some species already on the brink.

I voted yes, but I admit, I didn't read it closely and missed the requirement of an actual picture of the animal.  I have to agree, that is not a good idea.  We have a State Park close to home that is the last remaining refuge of the Western Brush Rabbit (Sylvilagus bachmani).  There are huge signs along the trails urging people to stay on the trail and not to disturb the animals.  So, I would suggest adding photo evidence (picture of a table, a sign, a poster or a display) as a possible substitute for a picture of an animal.

I believe that it is possible to change your vote during the process.

This and worse has crossed my mind believe me... however, I still believe in the idea of awareness of the animals and I also don't want to limit it to captivity because that is already covered essentially by zoos and I think that isn't what I am hoping for out of this either. However, whether this gets in or not I will put something in about being responsible with animals that you are seeing, as well as lightening the restriction on the pictures. I want a picture of animals that you are looking at, but perhaps they can be gotten from other web sources.

Advice appreciated.

Razak:

This and worse has crossed my mind believe me... however, I still believe in the idea of awareness of the animals and I also don't want to limit it to captivity because that is already covered essentially by zoos and I think that isn't what I am hoping for out of this either. However, whether this gets in or not I will put something in about being responsible with animals that you are seeing, as well as lightening the restriction on the pictures. I want a picture of animals that you are looking at, but perhaps they can be gotten from other web sources.

Advice appreciated.

I have an aside question on this subject. I remembered seeing a 'human fish' when I was in a cave in Slovenia.

This is a page about the fish http://camp.rrc-kp.si/praksa/proteus/index_en.htm

is says "In the 1922, Slovenia protected Proteus anguinus and all cave animals, while in 1982 Proteus anguinus was put on the list of rare and endangered wild animals, which prohibits their trade. " but I don't find it on the 'red list' web page.

I think I have a picture from the cave tour, they allowed pictures but no flashes. I do have a picture I took of a sign about them.

Would I be able to waymark this, if it is endangered but not on the red list? If I didn't have a photo of the creature in the cave, could I waymark with a picture inside the cave, and a link to another picture, or the picture of the sign? They are only found in that one cave.

 

globetrotters.us:

Razak:

This and worse has crossed my mind believe me... however, I still believe in the idea of awareness of the animals and I also don't want to limit it to captivity because that is already covered essentially by zoos and I think that isn't what I am hoping for out of this either. However, whether this gets in or not I will put something in about being responsible with animals that you are seeing, as well as lightening the restriction on the pictures. I want a picture of animals that you are looking at, but perhaps they can be gotten from other web sources.

Advice appreciated.

I have an aside question on this subject. I remembered seeing a 'human fish' when I was in a cave in Slovenia.

This is a page about the fish http://camp.rrc-kp.si/praksa/proteus/index_en.htm

is says "In the 1922, Slovenia protected Proteus anguinus and all cave animals, while in 1982 Proteus anguinus was put on the list of rare and endangered wild animals, which prohibits their trade. " but I don't find it on the 'red list' web page.

I think I have a picture from the cave tour, they allowed pictures but no flashes. I do have a picture I took of a sign about them.

Would I be able to waymark this, if it is endangered but not on the red list? If I didn't have a photo of the creature in the cave, could I waymark with a picture inside the cave, and a link to another picture, or the picture of the sign? They are only found in that one cave.

I did find this animal on the red list, it is listed as vulnerable which is accepted on the list. I do think I'm going to lax the picture rule a bit like I said to include one picture of the animal from any source as well as a picture of a sign, or some sort of evidence of the area to prove you were at a particular place to view it (even if that picture is a far off picture of the animal)

Razak:

This and worse has crossed my mind believe me... however, I still believe in the idea of awareness of the animals and I also don't want to limit it to captivity because that is already covered essentially by zoos and I think that isn't what I am hoping for out of this either. However, whether this gets in or not I will put something in about being responsible with animals that you are seeing, as well as lightening the restriction on the pictures. I want a picture of animals that you are looking at, but perhaps they can be gotten from other web sources.

Advice appreciated.

It would seem that the danger to the animals is more in the pursuit of them than the picture requirement.  Some endangered species are rare because of encroachment.  Some will abandon their nest if it is touched by human hands, or if humans are seen in the area.  Disruption of natural surroundings or migration could make a negative impact.  While raising awareness is virtuous, there might be many who are only interested in the game.  In some species, man could be the carrier of a biological threat.  For instance, parvo can be carried on a shoe for years after contact.  What impact might that bring to the environment of a canine-like species?  What avian diseases might be carried from pigeon scat unintentionally brought from a city?  How could the average waymarker be expected to know every precaution that should be taken with every animal or plant, and with waymarking being a world-wide activity, are we willing to bet an endangered animal's life that every waymarker in the world will understand and respect the many diverse fragilities of these creatures and fauna?   It is important to remember that when we are talking about an endangered species... even one mistake that causes a fatality or an aborted birth is one too many... especially when it results from a pastime that deliberately or indirectly causes it needlessly.  Awareness by all means is a very thoughtful and worthwhile pursuit, but waymarking, being unrelated to the science of preservation and more of a pursuit done casually and by its nature without much aforethought just isn't a good vehicle for raising this kind of awareness.

It is a wonderful idea, but the devil is in the details that you can't control.  Your heart is in the right place, but I would borrow from the first sentence of the Hypocratic Oath taken by doctors when trying to raise awarness about these plants and animals:

"First, do no harm."

I remember having the same discussion a couple of years ago about geocaches placed in sensitive areas leading to the "creation" of a new illegal trail in a formerly pristine area.  I agree with the "do no harm" prerogative, but I also believe in the good in people. Geocaching and its creative offspring Waymarking have always been sensitive to cultural and environmental issues and I truly believe this waymark category will do more good than harm.

There will always be stupid people out there but I don't think there will be an increase of those by this waymark.  Instead, this category, if phrased properly, can help raising awareness by pointing out sensitive areas.  The message should be "Be careful, stay on the trail, share your knowledge and if you get lucky and got a good picture, share that too."

Here is a good example. CalTrans has installed a webcam sowhere near Redding, California so people can watch the rare event of a breeding couple of Bald Eagles without having to climb the tree:

http://www.turtlebay.org/caltranseaglecam.php

I like the idea to loosen the pic requirement. I would even lessen it further to make a link to the pic or a page with pics. Copyright laws and that. Of course a photo of the location in general should be required still in my thinking and a photo the animal if not restricted or disruptive should be encouraged as well.

Bernd das Brot Team:

I remember having the same discussion a couple of years ago about geocaches placed in sensitive areas leading to the "creation" of a new illegal trail in a formerly pristine area.  I agree with the "do no harm" prerogative, but I also believe in the good in people. Geocaching and its creative offspring Waymarking have always been sensitive to cultural and environmental issues and I truly believe this waymark category will do more good than harm.

There will always be stupid people out there but I don't think there will be an increase of those by this waymark.  Instead, this category, if phrased properly, can help raising awareness by pointing out sensitive areas.  The message should be "Be careful, stay on the trail, share your knowledge and if you get lucky and got a good picture, share that too."

Here is a good example. CalTrans has installed a webcam sowhere near Redding, California so people can watch the rare event of a breeding couple of Bald Eagles without having to climb the tree:

http://www.turtlebay.org/caltranseaglecam.php

 

I really hate to push like this, but this is an issue that goes far beyond the game of waymarking.  You make my point for me: doing no harm is a perogative of the waymarker.  They are totally unsupervised in this situation and there is absolutely no accountability.  Even though there are many themes and axioms espoused about cultural and environmental issues within the geocaching/waymarking community, there are many instances where these "rules of thumb" have been ignored.  I believe almost any geocacher of experience will agree that to put absolute faith in every single person who will participate to do the right thing is naivity... and in this case the stakes are too high.

 

What are the costs versus the benefits?  Are we really to put our blessing on risking even one endangered species for the enjoyment of a game?  How much respect for conservation will the effort foster, and will it be worth it if it costs us another rare specimen?

 

For years, I taught SCUBA.  Divers are very knowledgable and highly aware of marine life and respect it as much as any group I know.  But on many occasions I saw thoughtless divers harrass manatees in the Crystal River of Florida.  And most did it because the temptation of a very rare and humbling encounter with an endangered species in it's natural environment became overwhelming, and their better judgement was discarded in the pursuit of a "moment" to remember and be proud of.  With this category, we will be creating a goal much like that of the divers where a competing priority is artificially interjected, and we are gambling on people we don't even know to show restraint.

 

The only way this category could be amended to insure that "no harm be done" would be to make compromises that would diminish the category into meaninglessness as a waymark category.  With a bit of creativity, using waymarking to bring awareness could possibly be done.  But anything that brings the waymarker to the environment presents risks that are just not worth the reward. Keep in mind what we are basically doing here: we are giving our blessing for this category to send mankind in pursuit of animals and plants that are endangered because of mankinds selfish pursuits. 

 

Oh the irony... create a category to increase awareness of endangered animals that may encourage further endangerment of them.

I too am uncomfortable in any category that might encourage someone to endanger animals.

I also will not vote yes for any category that plans on archiving waymarks.  Waymarks could easily be modified to announce the status change.  I can think of very few acceptable reasons to archive someone's waymark.  This is not one of them.

Here's my 2 cents. I like the category concept so I posted my peer review comments here.

Please, please consider changing this to only habitats and zoos. As far as pictures goes, how many times have you been to a zoo hoping to see an animal, and they're in the back, behind doors, curled up in a ball in a corner, etc. So taking pictures of the surrounding plaques should be sufficient. I don't think its necessary to archive waymarks when an animal is taken off the list. Maybe it could be written to include any animals that have ever been on the list. It would mean much less work on the officer's part maintaining the category. Plus I think it would still be very interesting knowing that these animals were once in danger, have been able to thrive, but are still susceptible of going back on the list. Also, why aren't you including plant species? How do you plan to handle Extinct animals on the list? I think those should be waymarked if they are on display in a museum.

Not including plants was a the request of someone else when I was throwing around this subject on the boards about 6 weeks ago when yes many of these here comments would have been far more helpful=/ Someone else was going to head up Red List Plants in a separate category essentially is your answer.

In defense of archiving. I included that because I do think that this should be only for active red list animals and not red list animals who have not been listed for 10 or 15 years and what not. I put in a year grace period for it precisely to combat too much archiving going on as this gives waymarks about 1.5-2 years before this becomes an issue and by that point in time it is likely that the animal returns to the list anyway. I also have never seen archiving done before and didn't realize that archiving=deleting... If you have a way to take it out of the category without deleting (let's call it archiving since that is what archiving is), by all means I'm ears. I don't like the idea of archiving either, but at the same time I want to keep this category a running directory of what is currently on the red list, not what has been on the red list previously. We could probably make a seperate category for that and include a lot of animals that I'm more than happy aren't there anymore.

With laxed picture taking rules, there will certainly be an ability to not actually see the animal at the zoo... though I certainly frown on that. I wanted people to not neccearily be able to just know but also have to see the animal to guarantee that it is there...

As for extinct, a good idea but beyond the scope of this particular category. This is meant for the living extinct might be a great idea for a seperate category though.

I can not support a category which requires removing a waymark because the list (thus criteria) changed for the category.  If the animal is on the list at the time of submission then why remove it.  You might add a variable that can be updated saying something like "Animal currently removed from list" or something and have waymark stay.  Thus as written... it got a Nay vote.

Btw, I don't behoove that others may disagree and while I can even see to some extent that perhaps this category isn't interesting because apparently animals are not interesting to some... ummmm the following denial caught me off guard.

"Vote:
Deny

Comments:
None"

Apparently reading isn't a strong suit to some, now granted the likeliness of this individual providing any sort of useful constructive criticism is nil, but geez.

At any rate, this review has been great IMHO and I will put serious thought into the category to figure out a way to correct some of the issues in order to alleviate fears. I think overall, the comments left were pretty good. Thank you to everyone=) Will resubmit and hopefully correct it.

Actually I was just reading through the waymarking.com release notes.

"- Added a new waymark status: Archived. Now you can archive a waymark or delete it. Archive would be used for waymarks which are seasonal, for instance. You can always unarchive a waymark, but you can't undelete one. You may find that some previously deleted waymarks have been resurrected as archived."

This one turns out to be exactly what I thought archiving was in the first place and I was wondering if the fact that it wouldn't actually be deleted would alleviate this fear.

This gets into a "What is you concept of waymarking?" philosophy discussion.  I believe that waymarks should not be archived (doesn't matter to me whether this is a deletion or an actual archive) just because the item waymarked has been removed/destroyed/ or no longer meets the criteria.  The suggestion has been made to the web site designers to add a "status" type display that clearly marks a waymark as no longer present at the location.

I think your category would be much better served by celebrating those waymarks of animals that recovered enough to be removed from the Red List instead of designating them as "not interesting enough for my category."

As I said, it rather boils down to your philosophy of how you think waymarking should work.  I disagree with you in this area.  That's why I voted no and will continue to do so as long as you plan to archive waymarks.

I don't know, I guess I just don't understand why it is so terrible to have categories where waymarks actually fit in with the category. That's just my deal though and this is for everyone so if everyone is still against archiving despite the fact that they have made archiving real, then whatever.

Here's another way of looking at it.  If someone is looking for current animals on the list, then the Red List has all that information there, and it's current.  If you are looking to educate the public, most of which have never heard of the Red List or know which animals have ever been on it, then you may want to consider broadening the requirements.  I understand the reasoning behind plants having a separate cat (although I think it would be OK to group it together like their website does), as well as the extinct ones (but wouldn't that be cool to know which species we lost in the last 10 years, especially if a museum had an exhibit on it?), and that's OK.  The big thing you should really consider re: the archiving, is that today you are really excited about the category and "into" it. What about a year from now, 5 years from now?  You may no longer be "into" it, and your officers (might not even be the same ones as today) will need to maintain the category.  Requiring yourself and your officers the responsibility of periodically checking back against the Red List to see if species are still there is setting the category up for problems in the future. Including a variable like Bruce suggested is a favored alternative, but also requires upkeep on either the officers or WM owner.   I certainly hope to be geocaching and waymarking in 5 years, but who knows?

Oh, and on GC.com when there is a benchmark that is no longer there, it is not archived. Rather it is marked as destroyed. So there is still a record of if being there.  You could create a variable with the option of Currently on List and Formerly on List.

I messed around with the archiving bit, and I must say that I wish there was an option, at least for premium members, to turn on and off archived waymarks. This would allow a waymarker to take out archived waymarks if they are looking for something to actually visit, but if they are just doing some online viewing to look at stuff they could still see items. I think this would really help out alleviate issues with the idea of archiving and hopefully is down the horizon... I think it is a natural evolution of the idea. Heck on gc.com to use that as an example as well, you can actually view archived geocaches so why not waymarks...

Either way I go about it though, there will be future work for officers. The non-archiving way loses the year grace period, so the work will actually be a little more immediate. =P The grace was meant as a way to make archiving rare. The nice thing about the Red List though is that it does update yearly so at the very least We only really have to look at it once to see what was removed and go through and do a sweep of all those animals at once and be done with it.