I’d like to repeat @jabrams_foc 's question in https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/map-legend-what-does-the-orange-color-represent/3573 as a feature request: “could [we] get a clear legend for the overlays on species maps?” A legend on the map itself would be a nice improvement over simply documenting the answer to this question in the wiki.
Well, we added the basic legend to taxon page maps, but with possible/probably changes coming to the way listed taxa are displayed (see loarie’s comment here) we’re not going to move forward with this request.
This has been requested before here and denied as there were some upcoming changes that haven’t happened yet:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/add-map-legend-for-all-overlays-on-taxon-pages/7584
Take a look at the map for Malacothamnus fremontii as an example:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/70397-Malacothamnus-fremontii
This species is taxonomically messy and will require some cleanup at some point as many plants have been misidentified as or lumped in M. fremontii in the past. An important question to ask though is what the heck the pink, green, and orange on this map is showing. If you go to the legend to see, you would find this:
So now we know that the green polygons are plants, the pink ones are fungi, and the orange ones are possibly Mollusks, Arachnids, or Insects.
This is obviously very wrong and very confusing. Anything on a map should be included in the legend so you know how to interpret it. It would make most sense if the legend was dynamic and only showed what was on the map, but just adding all the possibilities is the easiest and obvious first step to avoid confusion.
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Just a note, if you go to the “overlays” tab (the one that looks like three sheets of paper stacked up in the upper right of the map) you can see what each of those colored areas means. Sometimes the color doesn’t match exactly right, but by unclicking and reclicking a layer/overlay you can tell which is which is which pretty easily.
@keirmorse we merged your post here and reopened the existing request.
Context for others, see the recent responses at the bottom of https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/43337-upcoming-changes-to-lists
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@earthknight I found the “overlays” tab yesterday and it is cool that you can turn the various layers on and off, and add others I didn’t know were there. It’s no substitute for an accurate legend though.
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Overlays does not offer me ‘various layers’
And it doesn’t offer any explanation for why this area is green.
Does it conflict with my choice of satellite view?
I strongly support Keir’s request. The legend ought to be a complete legend. That’s where people go to figure out what is shown in a plot. I wouldn’t have thought of looking around for another symbol to click on. At the least, the legend ought to state something like “see also the overlay button at top right”. Remember, not everyone is a GIS expert who might realize that some things are in an overlay button.
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@dianastuder At least for the M. fremontii map above, you can add the overlays of captive/cultivated plants and GBIF network. It kind of fun to see as it shows all the misidentified specimens I’ll need to annotate. It’s also nice to know that the captive/cultivated observations can be included on the map if you want them there. The captive/cultivated observations are classified in the map legend as “Amphibians, Birds, Ray-Finned Fishes, Mammals, Reptiles, Other Animals”.
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The overlays function working separately from the legend is pretty standard in GIS (Geographic Information System) software. I suspect that’s why iNat has it implemented this way.
The idea way is to have the overlays and the legend both, but tp have the legend be dynamically updated depending on which overlays are displaying.
One of the problems that all GIS software seems to have regarding the legend is when overlays (layers) overlap with translucent colors. You wind up with a 3rd (or more) additional color that doesn’t register in the legend and can be confusing.
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Out of curiosity, I just looked around at maps and legends on other parts of the site. The map legend is already different for maps when just exploring observations. It’s missing map marker size.
So, seems like there already is a custom legend for taxon pages. The problem is that this should actually reflects what is on the taxon page map. I just looked at an animal taxon page to compare to plants and the coloration is identical to the plant maps. Here’s a red-eared slider:
So, “taxonomic groups” is totally wrong and should be removed from the legend of taxon pages. This should be replaced with what is in the overlays, ideally with a note that they may be turned on and off in the overlays as that is not at all obvious. I would have never guessed that the overlays had anything different than background layers like terrain and satellite imagery. That is all that is on the observation exploring maps. The same symbol to get to the “overlays” on the taxon maps is called “layers” on the observation exploring maps, which only has background layers.
I also noticed that there is no legend at all on the project maps.
But I still don’t know what the pink, green and yellow areas mean.
And I don’t know where or how to find out.
It is something to do with distribution.
Green = this plant is naturally found here
Pink? who knows.
And yellow?? even more confusing.
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This is not exactly the obvious place to put it (and may be a dated article besides - the images don’t really reflect the style of our maps today), but: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/atlases at least lays out clearly in the first paragraph the difference between observations, listed taxa, and taxon ranges. Additionally, near the bottom of the article:
Displaying establishment means and observed/unobserved on atlas presence places
… color indicates whether there are research-grade observations associated with a listed taxon (green) or not (orange). …
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@dianastuder Pink is the known range, which I uploaded to iNaturalist. Many or maybe most taxa don’t have that yet. As benarmstrong notes, green means the taxon is listed in that area and has a research grade observation. The yellow-orange means the taxon is listed in that area but doesn’t have a research grade observation. Basically, green and orange are a starting point for when there isn’t any pink and all could be worth checking against each other. There is a good reason there is orange for some of the areas on the M. fremontii map. Many of those areas have what was considered that species in some treatments but not in others. Basically, orange means it needs some evidence to confirm if it actually is there. In this case, it’s mostly a taxonomic issue but, in other cases, the orange may just show where something has been erroneously put on a list in the past or correctly put on the list but hasn’t been documented on iNat yet. Bottom line, it needs a legend.
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I think “most” is right, and the vast majority are vertebrates.
Actually has or had a research grade observation, since place checklists are not re-calculated based on updates to existing RG observations. Observations that reach RG and then get corrected to something else can leave behind “ghosts” in the place checklists that have to be fixed manually.
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That explains why I haven’t seen pink on ‘my’ distribution maps for fynbos etc around Cape Town.
The lack of a legend for coloured areas, and the possible existence of “ghost” information on the maps, makes these maps confusing.
For instance, can someone help me make sense of this?
(Source: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/706044-Meloe-autumnalis )
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The northern green area is a county-level place called Corse-du-Sud. There is an obscured RG observation of M. autumnalis in this place, so it’s colored green, but the accuracy on the observation is so large that it is considered unmappable, so no dot appears on the map within the boundary.
The southern orange area is a county-level place called Sassari. There is a RG observation of M. autumnalis in this place as well, but it seems to have run into one of the problems affecting checklists – they don’t always update properly (which is one reason why this functionality will eventually be removed). You can manually refresh it, which will cause it to turn green, by going to the listed taxon page and clicking refresh:
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