I’m defining a place that’s based on a piece of land owned by a local organization. If I put the border of the place exactly on the property line, some observation very close to the edge get missed because of the accuracy circle. There’s also the area just outside the property, where it’s part of the verge of the road but where people make observations on the way in and out.
If you’re creating a place do you make the boundary a little larger than the actual property? Or is there another way to handle it?
I see no reason not to extend the border by 10 to 20 meters beyond the property line. Remember, Mobile GPS accuracy circles often have an error margin of 5 to 10 meters. A slight buffer just makes sure that an observation actually taken inside the property isn’t pushed outside of it not having any cause with bad data. I would also argue a slightly generous boundary results in much more complete and useful data for the organization
If you really wanted to do it another way you could make a project and then manually include the missing observations.
and if you get extra observations on tge neighbouring sites it adds ecology info, esp re seed sources of wild seedlings, desirable or itherwise.
If their observations muddy your data, you can always limit observers or exclude them, within your project.
It isn’t possible to have a project that includes a mixture of automatically added and manually added observations. Either everything has to be added manually or nothing can be.
I think you could use an umbrella project for this lumping a traditional project with manual addition and a collection project to get manually added and automatically collected in one project (I think I remember someone suggesting this on a previous thread).
In regard to the OPs question, I think it really depends on your use case. I personally generally think that adding buffered boundaries is the best choice. For large places, it doesn’t make much of a difference, and for very small places, a better solution is often manual addition (as adding a little bit of a buffer still likely won’t catch all observations of interest anyways). There probably are some situations where the buffer will help appreciably: small place with lots of observations that are a pain to add manually, specific issue where observations are likely to be coming from the edges (like above with the entrance), specific situation where you definitely need all observations in a place and can’t miss any that are made on the edge.
If a user does make a place that intentionally doesn’t match the property’s boundaries, I think it is helpful to note that in the title (adding “buffered” or similar) so that other users aren’t confused/misunderstand. I’ve seen cases where users flags places for incorrect boundaries because place creators did similar.