if iNat staff don’t want to add altitude, i’m not sure why they would want to link to something just to allow someone to lookup elevation. does Google Earth even work on mobile devices without installing the app?
if you just need the elevation, you could always just look it up relatively quickly using some service like Open-Elevation’s public API. you can get the coordinates relatively easily by doing the following:
- get the URL from the Google Maps link (ex. https://www.google.com/maps?q=29.7352818105,-95.4277158082)
- retain the part of the URL that has the coordinates, but replace it with a URL that will call the Open-Elevation API (ex. https://api.open-elevation.com/api/v1/lookup?locations=29.7352818105,-95.4277158082)
- navigate to that new URL in your browser, and it’ll display results like this:
{"results": [{"latitude": 29.7352818105, "longitude": -95.4277158082, "elevation": 20}]}
i’m sure there are also apps or extensions that you could install or write yourself that would allow you to translate that Google Maps link into a link that would take you to Google Earth or whatever other service could provide elevations.
more discussion here:
- https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/an-optimized-workflow-to-determine-the-altitude-of-an-observation/17465
- https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/altitude-on-observations/1476
…
i thought once about writing a tool that would allow you to add a looked up elevation figure to an observation via an observation field, but i thought that could easily be abused. so i never went down that path.