Firstly, apologies from a newbie. I am the webmaster for an organization that visits and reports on natural areas here in Alberta (Western Canada).
Our botanists (of which I am not one) use iNaturalist extensively. Our board wants to adopt iNaturalist as the tool of choice to record all biophysical sightings in the areas.
As a result, this question is nuanced a little bit in that it is about ‘consuming’ iNaturalist results via custom borders rather than iNaturalist functionality.
The link below provides a mock up to such a natural area, Egg Island. If you scroll down, you will see the iNaturalist logo and if clicking on it takes you to a custom border URL.
I am envisioning having such a link for each of the 248 protected areas in Alberta. We will hand draw the border, record the link, and update each of the pages. We do have KMZ and polygons for the sites as well.
Enough background, here are my questions:
How permanent is this link? Will it work in a year or so , or is there an expiry date? Don’t worry about changes in technology, this is about link standards.
Does iNaturalist have an iFrame ‘thingy’ similar to the Google Map above? Rather than displaying a static image, can we render the iNaturalist map instead? I am not seeing a ‘share’ or ‘embed’ option.
Egg Island is listed as a place of interest, should I link to that URL instead of drawing my own? Note, not all Natural Areas may show up on iNaturalist.
Beyond a manual build, and noting zero budget and limited technical skills, is there a better way to create these custom borders versus a hand build?
Is the promotion and credit sufficient for linking to iNaturalist? I am trying to not violate any Terms of Use.
Do you have words of wisdom if you were in our shoes as to how to proceed? Is there something obvious we should think about first and foremost?
The place links are also standard with no planned expiry. Place links from years ago still work. I would suggest that this is probably the best idea overall. If you use other user created places, be aware that users do control their own places. Occasionally place boundaries change, so these wouldn’t be updated automatically or anything.
One note - smaller places on iNat don’t always capture all observations likely to have been inside them. This is due to accuracy circles and how place “membership” is calculated spatially. If most of your locations of interest are larger, it’s probably not an issue.
Thank you for the insights. I guess part of the implementation plan will be to start with the places that pre-exist and include them. Any thoughts on embedding an iNaturalist map on another website?
An alternative would be to use a screen shot but this would defeat the purpose of an online community that is constantly evolving.
BTW, I may have to drive about 10 hours north, rent a boat, and make an observation so there is at least ONE on Egg Island, lol.
which produces this map. Substitute your place name (or numeric ID) and (after the “#”) the scale and center-point latitude and longitude of your site. It should work with inaturalist.ca as well.
while this is possible within iNat and affiliate pages, i’m fairly certain that iNat disallows cross origin use of most of their webpages. so you can try, but it probably won’t work inside an iframe in a third party site.
you probably need to create your own map using iNat’s API and your own basemap service. you can look at the GitHub repo referenced in my profile for examples of such custom maps. you’re welcome to adapt the code there, but don’t embed my pages directly in your page. (if i find that folks are embedding my pages in their own pages, that will force me to add some framekilling code in them, which i prefer not to do.) you can also search the forum for “mappiness”, and that will take you to a thread that explains how to make your own custom maps using the API, which may be helpful if you’ve never worked with that sort of thing before.