A better way to define a geographical area for Identifications

Website - Identify

I have recently started to identify audio observations. I am pretty good at birding by ear so, I thought I would give it a try. I have been able to ID a lot. But, I ran into a couple of issues.

There is no way to define a geographical area in the Identify webpage because there is no way to view the observations on a map. You must use the defined Places. This doesn’t give an identifier a good way to define a geographical area unless that person wants to define new Places. And, when you go to set up a new Place, the web page tells you to think about doing it. It discourages you from doing so. I know I don’t want to create a bunch of new Places just for my own use for identification.

But, thankfully, there is a workaround:

  1. Go to the Explore - Map.

  2. Use the circle or square to define your area. (I like to spread the circle out from Ohio to include surrounding states and parts of Canada because that’s where the birds I am familiar with will be. There isn’t a Place that gives me this. The Midwest leaves out areas to the east, south and north of Ohio. I think there’s a Lower Great Lakes place which also falls short of what I want.)

  3. Set up your Filters.

  4. Click on the Identify link on the Filters window. This takes me to the Identify webpage which is really, really good for identifying with the pop-up windows and the other processes.

I had been identifying observations for about a week using various Places. I was very frustrated because I couldn’t get what I wanted geographically. I posted in the Forums. Another user told me about the workaround. I never would have thought of that. The Explore webpage is for exploring.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a good solution. I don’t know how to make the workaround more obvious. It is a much better process to get to the areas for what I want to identify. I realize that putting a Map option in the Identify page would be a major undertaking - maybe not. But, I know that I am much happier and much more likely to identify observations now that I can define an area.

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Hi @ken_ohio I saw that you submitted this as a feature request, but since there isn’t a clear actionable change that is being proposed, I posted this in the general category instead. If the discussion leads to an idea for a specific change to the website it could turn into a new proposal (in a new topic) that would be placed in feature requests.

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it sounds to me like the proposal is to add a way within the Identify screen to specify a box or circle (other than via URL or switching back and forth between the Explore page).

there’s also the option of creating a collection project that includes a set of places that you’re interested in. you can then filter by that project instead of trying to filter by a single place.

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I think the gist is there, but the Identify page is pretty busy and the feature request template asks,

In detail, describe the feature you are requesting. This includes its functionality, where the feature is implemented, and what it might look like. Screenshots or mock-ups are helpful. The idea is to have a concrete and actionable request which the community can discuss and vote on. It might change through discussion, but it’s much easier to iterate and talk about something specific.

I do it like this since a while and it was a game changer for sure!
Good way to work yourself into a specific local taxon

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Thanks for reading it. I understand why it was moved. I hope it can generate something useful for the iNaturalist website.

Good idea! I don’t know why I didn’t think to mention that before.

Here are a couple I made like this:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/vascular-flora-of-southeastern-us
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/south-central-us-ecoregions

PS if you give me the places you want to include (Ohio and ??) I set it up for you and then make you the admin.

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You can also type /identify in between the word observations and ? in the url from the explore page, so it would read https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?…, which is what I do but it probably does the same thing as clicking that link.

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So, I could use existing Places that are U.S. states and Ontario, and create a project for identifying?

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Yes, you can create a collection project which includes multiple places. You can also set it to only include observations with sounds. You can’t set it to only include Birds and Unknown because “Unknown” is not a taxon. You could set it all taxa and then click on the Birds and Unknown buttons in the filter drop down. Or you can set it to exclude taxa. For example you could exclude insect, mammal, and amphibian sounds.

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Ah… Here…

https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000176246-common-collection-project-use-cases

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I keep forgetting that they have all those help articles now. Used to be you just asked questions on the forum.

The new help articles are good. They have been / are updated as things change on iNat - which is even better.

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What is the current opinion among staff and moderators about the proliferation of collection projects? Is this an issue? Consider the scenario when every identifier began creating specific collection projects for a handful of places where they go to Identify!

Collection projects are a nice way to display a set of filters.
It is the traditional projects which are (gently) discouraged.

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