Description of need:
Strangely there is no place type for parks. Currently most parks seem to be marked as either “Land Feature” or “Open Space”, neither of which is really appropriate. This has been brought up on the forum a couple timesbefore, but never addressed by iNat staff AFAIK. It seems like a strange oversight as we have place types for Airport, City Building, Intersection, Estate, and lots of others that are probably never used, but nothing for parks, which is probably one of the most common types of places created on iNaturalist. Does the list come from some external controlled vocabulary? Or could we just add “Park”?
Feature request details:
I know that tiwane said many years ago that new feature requests for place pages were not being accepted, but this would be a very trivial feature to add and seems like a weird oversight.
I took a look at our current local park system’s project running for September. They used “Local Administrative Area” to define the land coverage/place for this project. This includes 18 reservations (parks) and other land holdings. This is the Cleveland Metroparks.
I’m sensing a slippery slope where we begin subdividing parks into different types. The list of place types on iNaturalist is already fully of redundancies and needs fixing first. I would love a park category for use in certain projects, but the place organization features are so unmaintained we probably should have curators for places as well.
A National Park is very different from a State Park, which is very different from a neighborhood park. And I agree, people who would not be satisfied with classifying all these as “Open Space” probably would also be unsatisfied with one “Park” category that did not distinguish these.