A "drainage" place does not go all the way to the bay

General
#1

Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): IOS

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Chrome

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/places/temescal-creek-watershed-ca-us; https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?project_id=temescal-creek-watershed-observations

Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):

Screen Shot 2020-10-22 at 5.00.29 PM
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Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):
This is an existing place, a drainage for Temescal Creek Watershed in Berkely/Oakland/Emeryville CA. The problem is that the drainage map stops before the shoreline and does not include parts of the land east of the highway nor the McLaughlin State Park which includes the actual mouth of the creek and the mudflat territory.
While I know that I can create a new place, it is a complicated map and thought you’d want to know the drainage basin map is missing a crucial part of the basin. Therefore we can’t see the observations made there in our actual Temescal Creek Watershed project, (Both are linked above).
I haven’t yet checked other watersheds in the SF East bay, but will do so and report back. Can you help us by editing that drainage basin to include the shoreline and into the mudflats where we’re observing a lot of species?

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

2 Likes
#2

Moved to general since this is not technically a bug. I’ll get back to you when I’m back on computer, or someone else will before that.

#3

Thanks. Just looked at Sausal Creek which seems to have the same issue.

#4

I can edit the shape, but I’m afraid I don’t totally understand the text description of what you want.

This is the shape now:

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How much do you want added? Can you either annotate this shape with what you want or supply a replacement kml file that I can upload? Something like this:

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#5

@hydrocycler For future reference, if you go to a place’s page, eg https://www.inaturalist.org/places/temescal-creek-watershed-ca-us and scroll to the bottom, you can see who created the place (if their account is still on iNat):

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You can message the user who created it and ask them about the place’s boundaries, if you like.

3 Likes
#6

Ah Ha! I assumed that iNat admins had made the drainage basins. Not sure why I thought that.
@jwidness YES! I’m not great on tech so don’t know how to redraw the red box in google maps but if the NW corner could expand further west a bit to cover up to the first road, that would be great. Otherwise, yes, just like you have it. Then we’ll be able to see our observations at the mouth of the creek.
In this vein, is there any way to somehow embed these iNaturalist maps (with the species points) in other applications? We’re using a version of google earth to build walking tours for these creeks on PocketSites. It would be quite something to be able to incorporate all the observation points in the watershed. Here’s one part of the Sausal Creek tour in an early stage of development: https://pocketsights.com/tours/tour/Oakland-Walking-Waterhoods%3A-Temescal-Creek-New-Uplands-4533
We’re also including the capacity for people on the tour to upload their own content, so it is also crowd sourcing.

1 Like
#7

The reason the drainage area doesn’t go all the way to the bay is because the official drainage map uses the original shoreline, and areas that were filled in later don’t appear on any drainage area.

https://acfloodcontrol.org/the-work-we-do/resources/#explore-watersheds

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The more I think about it, the more I think it makes sense to leave the official drainage map as is, and add a new place called something like “Temescal Watershed Extension” just for the filled area. Does that seem reasonable to you? You can probably make it yourself by drawing the shape during place creation. Let me know if that doesn’t work for you.

In terms of embedding observations, there are lots of threads in the forum discussing the project widget and other possible options. Here are a few of them:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/inaturalist-web-widget/14415
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/observations-widget-is-not-working-anymore/7892
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/documentation-for-observation-widget/11790

#8

the iNaturalist API (see https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/docs/) can provide several flavors of raster tiles for observations, along with matching UTFgrids. this is probably the best way to include observations in an app with a map.

if you just want to see the points, the raster tiles will do the job. if you wand to make the points interactive, you’ll need to incorporate the UTFgrids. example:
page: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_map.html
code: https://github.com/jumear/stirfry/blob/gh-pages/iNat_map.html

If you want to customize the maps beyond the styles and color options that the API provides, you could do something more exotic with the UTFgrids, or else you would have to pull in the individual observations (via the get observations endpoint) and map them individually (though that latter option is not really scalable beyond a couple hundred observations). example of UTFgrid-based custom map:
page: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_UTFgrid_based_density_map_for_Leaflet.html
code: https://github.com/jumear/stirfry/blob/gh-pages/iNat_UTFgrid_based_density_map_for_Leaflet.html

#9

Ok, yes, that was the original shoreline, but the Oakland Museum maps extend it out to the bay. But I get keeping the original shoreline also, which is cool.
Here the Oakland Museum watershed map. http://explore.museumca.org/creeks/1160-OMTemescalBig.html

So I did make a new place. Mouth of Temescal Creek 2. I made an earlier version with an incorrect border but can’t get it to fully delete. It shows in the results but then pulls up “null” when you click so I made a second one with correct boundaries and called it 2. Oddly, even though I have created a number of projects and places before on iNat, no observations are showing in this new place Mouth of Sausal Creek 2. Not sure what’s going on there. Thoughts? Once I solve that problem, I can make “mouth” sections for the other creeks as well and add them to the watershed projects for Sausal, Strawberry and Peralta - all of which we are building tours for right now and doing monthly livestreams.

#10

OK, this is GREAT news. I have no idea what any of that actually means about raster tiles but I’ll find a tech person who does and see if we can figure out how to do that on PocketSites so we can incorporate the observations. My CAL interns will be thrilled to hear they don’t have to recreate them which is what they are currently tasked with. Wohooooo!

#11

BTW, the Oakland Museum map also shows the original marshes and wetlands, so those are great maps for historical watershed features as well.

#12

It just must take a new place a few minutes to populate with observations because they are showing now in Mouth of Temescal Creek Watersheds 2 (place) and in the (project) Temescal Creek Watershed: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?project_id=temescal-creek-watershed-observations

#13

Glad it’s working for you. I’m a little confused about the map you linked though – I see the creek itself extended to the west as a red line, but the watershed (in pale orange) stops at the same place as the previous map.

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#14

Yes, you can see the green line, which is also showing “original watershed”. All the green squiggly sections indicate where marshes once were. All around 53-55th and San Pablo zone. So cool. But, ecologically speaking, the mouth is now in the bay where the culvert emerges. The other side of that culvert briefly daylights around Bay Street.I don’t think any of the creeks get into the Bay exactly where they did before culverting. For instance, Sausal really fanned out and was marshland and drained into the estuary across that fan as opposed to a concentrated exit point it has now near Fruitvale Bridge.

I also created a new place/drainage called Mouth of Temescal Creek Watershed.