>It looked like they were also working on considering location when determining species, but the model I use doesn't do that.
I do this in fish for very different work and there's a good chance the model for your species does not exist yet. For fish we have 6,000 distribution models based on sightings (aquamaps.org) but there are at least 20,000 species. These models have levels of certainty from 'expert had a look and fixed it slightly manually' to 'automatically made based on just three sightings' to 'no model as we don't have great sightings data'. So it may be that the model uses location, just not for the species you have?
that is actually surprising. surely they use location at some point in the ID process. its possible they have a secondary location based model to do sorting/ranking after the initial detection?
Merlin's bird detection system is almost non-functional without location.
yeah that's true! You can't really do that, these models are just polygons, all we do is doublecheck the other methods' predictions' overlap with these polygons as a second step.
I do this in fish for very different work and there's a good chance the model for your species does not exist yet. For fish we have 6,000 distribution models based on sightings (aquamaps.org) but there are at least 20,000 species. These models have levels of certainty from 'expert had a look and fixed it slightly manually' to 'automatically made based on just three sightings' to 'no model as we don't have great sightings data'. So it may be that the model uses location, just not for the species you have?