GPCA - Georgia Plant Conservation Alliance: Data Sharing Safety Check, 2019

Georgia Plant Conservation Alliance: Data Sharing Safety Check, 2019 Addendum to the Policy Statement Regarding in situ and ex situ Plant Conservation Between Members of the Georgia Plant Conservation Alliance, 2008 https://botgarden.uga.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/GPCA-SafeguardingPolicy-Statement-.pdf Advances in technology have enabled plant conservation collaboration to accelerate greatly over the last 20 years through sharing information about imperiled plant species, their recovery needs, locations, actions, and safeguarding holdings. When the GPCA first began our work, there was no internet for looking up colleagues studying a rare plant community or images of an endangered wildflower. Now, finding experts for a particular genus or technique is a simple task via the internet. The flow of information, the sharing of knowledge is essential to the conservation of rare species. The dissemination of the location of rare species can leave species vulnerable to un-ethical actions like poaching from wild sites.

To ensure that our partners, volunteers, visitors, and students do not accidently share location information of rare plant species, we implement this “Data Safety Check” to be used in situ at field sites and ex situ at locations for safeguarding species, to prevent the accidental sharing of locations of imperiled populations, plant communities, or element occurrences.

Like the US Forest Service’s round circle “Safety Check” discussions in the field before embarking on a field trip in natural areas, we are implementing a “Data Safety Check” to also be used before going the field to work in a rare plant community, population, or element occurrence. The “Data Safety Check” should also be used before visiting conservation collections at public gardens, nature centers, and plant nurseries, as their plant collections are labeled and indexed, linking them to the wild sites from which they came, potentially leading poachers to wild populations of imperiled plant species.

This document will be updated regularly as technology evolves.

Current draft April, 2020.

Before entering a rare plant community or an ex situ plant conservation collection: 1. Turn off the GPS location setting for all devices for photography. Images in our smart phones and cameras are “stamped” with latitude and longitude detail unless this setting is actively switched off. For tips on turning off this function on smartphones, Google the phrase “Disable the Camera's Location Settings” and “Privacy Location Services.”

NOTE: putting a phone on “airplane mode” will not turn off location data attached to photos and videos.

2. Be mindful to not give away location clues in the images, posts, or captions of images you share on social media. If you choose to share an image containing a rare plant species or its habitat in the wild, do not discuss location information of the rare plants. Further, do not leave clues for potential poachers to locate the element occurrence such as local landmarks, land features, or other details from your field trip (restaurants, highways, hotels, local towns, mountain ridges, water towers).

Further, do not disclose the location or share potential location clues for rare plant collections at botanical gardens, plant nurseries, nature centers, or universities. Saying you are at a botanical garden in Atlanta or posting additional images from your visit to Atlanta that day is potentially hurtful to those safeguarding collections. Poachers have in the past stolen plants from conservation collections at these institutions, taking very specific plants that they had learned about (example, poachers took Whitetop Pitcherplants from Georgia specifically, despite Whitetop Pitcherplants being on site from other states).

3. Follow any comments made on your rare plant social media posts closely. Know that a friend or colleague could leave clues to locations in comments on your image. Be mindful to delete this information immediately. Suggest to your friends that they not talk about the location of these rare plants beyond state.

4. If using iNaturalist, turn off the location information for the images. Know that some of our partners have observed location information still coming through when location information was requested to remain private. For this reason, we ask partners not to share images on iNaturalist of very charismatic, historically poached, species including orchids, carnivorous plants, azaleas, and medicinal plant species.

5. Respect the privacy of private landowners. Remember, anyone can look up a resident’s name and find their home address. Do not share private landowner names or location details, unless expressly warranted and permitted by the landowners themselves. We can imagine media pieces showcasing the good work of private landowners, and the need then to share their names as part of a story-line. But we will only share their names and their stories with their permission and only if there are no associated conservation concerns like those associated with charismatic species.

6. Follow best practices known, and seek clouds, programs, hard-drives that require two-step authentication for your special data. When storing information about the locations of rare plant species, including field notes, project data, spreadsheets, images, and maps, use programs and file storing that requires two-step verification to access the material.

Just because a file is marked “private” in a cloud, do not assume it will always remain private. And just because you are storing that file on a private computer, do not assume it will always remain private. Personal computers can be vulnerable. Anyone can be hacked at any time. “Bot programs” or Internet Robots are simple programs that seek information, crawling the internet looking for everything and anything they are coded for.

7. Remain careful when organizing or promoting visits to rare plant sites. Don’t share driving directions to rare plant locations via email or the internet with your students, colleagues, or volunteers. When setting up field work, agree to meet in a public or common area and caravan as needed from there. Remind everyone attending not to share the location after visiting the site.

Remember that once information is shared, it is compromised. The basic rule here, is “don’t share data out of a secure area.” Once you share a location via the internet, it stays the internet and can be recovered even if you remove it. If you share a map or powerpoint with maps or location names, that information is compromised. If you share driving directions to a site, that information can be discovered. When you must share data with project colleagues, create password protected files and password protected access with your immediate project partners. There is no need to share your data, maps, field notes with all of our conservation colleagues. That only makes your information vulnerable.

We as conservation biologists do not need access to location information for all of the rare plant projects in order to do our work. If someone is demanding location details from you, be cautious of a “collector mentality.”

A caveat for education and outreach: If someone appears to have a sincere interest in visiting or photographing rare species or imperiled plant communities, but we are unable to verify their trustworthiness and/or confirm their need for the information they are requesting, it would be best to direct them to well-known, publicly accessible locations. (For example: Doerun WMA trail for pitcherplants, Montezuma Bluffs WMA trail for trilliums, Providence Canyon State Park for Plumleaf Azalea, etc.) It would not generally be necessary to implement the data security measures outlined above when visiting specific, publicly-accessible locations already publicized by the managing agency for the presence of particular plant species or communities.