Amend various municipality borders (e.g. counties in the US) to include pelagic territorial waters

Feature Requests
1

Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: Website/mobile

URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant: n/a

Description of need:
I am a birder who invests a lot in pelagic trips. Something I’ve found is that when uploading observations from these trips, when I place the observations in the expected locations (out in the ocean) oftentimes these obs are far enough out that they don’t make it within what inaturalist considers to be part of the counties they occurred in. On ebird these are counted as part of the county those waters are part of. The problem here is that because they don’t show up in the county/state borders, they don’t show up in most peoples’ inaturalist feeds, as they typically filter by county/state. Because of this, these observations will sometimes take weeks or months to be reviewed by someone who can ID the bird, even though it occurred in an otherwise high-traffic area with lots of active iNatters.

Feature request details:
Municipality borders should be amended to include waters further out, where pelagic bird observations are often placed, so that these observations can receive the same visibility as other observations which occurred in those municipalities.

2

I approved this for discussion but it’s unlikely a change for Standard Places will happen soon.

More about Standard Places on iNat.

3

This would be a useful one, though. Based on the linked article, it seems like a similar concept to the coastal buffer, except that maritime geopolitical boundaries extend further out than 0.05 degrees. Interestingly, just this week I was listening to the Mongabay podcast on the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) treaty, which is address the question of how to regulate oceanic waters that do not fall within any nation’s EEZ or seafloor claim. So, from a biodiversity standpoint, maritime boundaries are important.

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