I was about to add new Place, a nature reserve that is near me, but then, I figured the Norwegian government has open data where the national parks, nature reserves and so on can be synced directly from the official databases, and therefore also updated when a new locality is protected or updated.
It seems that these protected areas are valuable to have as Places in iNat. There’s quite a lot of them.
Are there any ways to have this kind of dynamic sync of places in iNat?
No, there isn’t. Place boundary editing is computationally intensive on iNat, so there aren’t any automatic updates to them.
I also think it could be very confusing to have automatic updates to places. Projects run on places, so any changes to places would lead to changes in the observations included in projects. This could making using projects to track data difficult as data before/after place boundary changes would be outside project control and lead to datasets not being directly comparable.
I also don’t think that place boundaries change all that much (at least in my experience), so this seems like a big change for addressing an uncommon issue.
Right, so you’re saying that things like Nature Reserves are unsuitable as places, since they can change?
I realize there is a problem of scale here, since there are a lot of protected areas around the world. We have about 3000 in Norway, 5000 in Sweden, protected through the biodiversity law, and also a lot protected as recreational areas. From what I can tell, there are a few hundred changes to protection regulation a year, both in Norway and Sweden. That doesn’t necessarily entail changing the borders, but I recall there were some tens of border changes in just a month, which is probably not typical, but still.
So, there is a real risk that a definition becomes stale, as I would suspect very few actually track changes to a these protected areas. My feeling is that Nature Reserves would be important for defining a locality, but if that only serves to disrupt how people use iNat, then yes, perhaps the protection status is not an important geographical unit.
The way I’d read it is that places, as they are being used on iNaturalist, shouldn’t change in unpredictable, and untraceable ways. Places do change, but every time I’ve seen it it was a deliberate decision by someone within the iNaturalist community, not external to it.
OK, I see. However, these aren’t entirely unpredictable, untraceable. They are legal constructs, managed through hearings, local elected bodies, procedures. These are grounded in international agreements, such as the Convention of Biological Diversity. While I appreciate the local governance of the iNat community, I’m not entirely convinced it makes it suitable to have as a source of truth for the extent of areas that are managed with such governance.
My feeling is therefore that either, it should be left to be managed by external bodies, or it needs to have an internal process to make sure that it stays current with the regulations, or it should be left out entirely.
Since I think protected areas are useful places, and it seems infeasible and also wasteful to have an internal process, I would still make the case for such an update mechanism.
Aside from places imported from Google, places have so far been community curated. I am, for example, free to make a 1 km square area anywhere and call it “My place”, just for my personal use. Technically this place has equal status to the place I made for my town with an “officially” distributed KMZ file. Places like this are stable in the sense that they only change if someone on the platform changes them.
You’re essentially arguing for a different tier for places that are externally vetted and maintained. They would be “official” but less stable. You can advocate for that, of course. Be prepared to deal with the slew of local organizations that would need to be managed, worldwide. Would they cooperate for free? Curators would still have to deal with user requests (include the lake; the name is misspelled; why isn’t this park a proper place; you should work with this organization, not that one; and of course why did this place change, put it back the way it was). Be prepared for territorial disputes. So there’s a cost/benefit consideration to this.
If you’re going to pitch an idea like this, I’d suggest fleshing it out a bit more, address a few of these issues, and definitively take a more global view.
I would have been interested in making the code to import protected areas, but yes, beyond that, I wouldn’t have time to curate everything beyond that.
So, I’ll refrain from adding nature reserves, and just add some informally defined places instead.
You can make places from well defined data files, that’s good and desirable. Having them automatically changed by someone external to iNaturalist, who is likely unresponsive to community input is where it gets problematic.
@kjekje I think this is the key issue and drawback. Being able to automatically update minor corrections and refinements to nature reserves and other places would of course be helpful. But at the same time, we would have to deal with the boundary whiplash of, for example, certain U.S. National Monuments during the past decade. Projects based on those boundaries would be untenable unless the boundaries were curated independently within iNaturalist.
One could make the place “ (as defined on )”.
Moving boundaries is not unique to protected areas. My home Civil Parish (or at the geographical scope of the Town Council) was extended a year or so back, which would be an issue if I got round to writing a parish flora. Elsewhere in the county a pair of Civil Parishes have been merged.