I think it would be quite logical and nice to be able to filter observations on iNat based on biogeographic realms - however the current situation in this regard is not very good. I understand that people coming from different backgrounds can have different ideas on where the boundaries are, so for complete satisfaction, more options would be needed (for example the status of the Arabian peninsula is highly debated), but at this moment, some realms have NO regions defined on iNat and some have questionable boundaries.
Nearctic: OK
Afrotropics: OK
Neotropic: missing - completely nonsensical small region under the name
Paleartic (full): missing
ā Western Palearctic exists, but under an unusual definition that includes central Asia but excludes Iceland
ā Eastern Palearctic: missing
Indomalayan: missing
Australasian, Oceanian: missing - there is āOceania - continentā that covers the two (without Wallacea, but thatās a matter of opinion) but nothing for the two individual regions.
Moreover all the existing regions cover mainly land - sometimes they go out into the oceans to grab some islands, but most of the oceans are kept outside, which messes up pelagic and marine records.
The problem is that for a regular user itās not possible to define new regions to fill the gaps as āplacesā are limited by roughly the size of Texas.
I concur, especially for marine realms since their biogeography does not match with the terrestrial one at all. Even limiting to the major oceans would be handy, since in some places that are at the interface itās difficult to get lists that reflect marine biogeography. e.g. if youāre looking for marine fishes of the Pacific of Panama, or the Indian Ocean faunas of Thailand.
Also, some well-delimited sea regions would be useful, such as the Mediterranean Sea. It is shared by three ācontinentsā and two terrestrial biogeographic regions, and if you use āMediterraneanā it gives you the terrestrial climatic area, that includes parts of the Atlantic Ocean and Black Sea.
Thereās been some discussion of this, and adding more marine places is under review, but apparently having these large places creates an infrastructure burden - perhaps @carrieseltzer can update on any discussions that have taken place since the other thread?
On the theoretical part, I would like to point out two things:
There are no biogeographic (or climatic) borders that are objectively a clear line on the ground, like the borders of states. The living world is a continuum in which its parts are always connected by transitions. Clear lines on biogeographic maps are a simplification made for clarity. Objectively, there is no line with strictly one biogeographic area on one side and another on the other. Just as there is no place to say that the right side is temperate, and the left side is subtropical.
The evolution and dispersal of different groups of organisms occurred somewhat separately. Therefore, there are many concepts of the biogeographic division of the Earth and ideas about the borders between areas. Therefore, there is, for example, no āPaleartic realmā as a single generally accepted concept. And if in its western part the ideas about its southern boundary are at least similar among different biologists, the southeastern boundary remains very debatable. Because of this, even scientific catalogs of the Palaearctic actually use political boundaries of states. At least, I know of no other examples.
On the practical point, Iām not sure that these theoretical concepts are really important for citizen science and amateur naturalists. Academic researchers of biogeography, meanwhile, may well use open iNaturalist data for their concepts.
So while I too would be comfortable in some cases seeing observations within Palaearctic or Nearctic limits, I donāt think that trying to set up such locations here would certainly be difficult and unlikely to be productive.
Yes I would love a way to search for just the Atlantic Ocean or the whole Caribbean, because now I have to make custom bounding boxes to even try and grab an area and I canāt usually get the whole thing with a polygon without biting off a piece of the east Pacific of east Atlantic
Remember, too, that these biogeographic realms are based on zoogeography. Floristic realms have different boundaries, that is, Cape is separate from Afrotropical and California is separate from the rest of North America.
You are talking about larger areas, but for native bees in the US, probably Canada too, we get recommendations from the CV for eastern bees all the time up in my corner of the Pacific NW. The east has been well documented and many western bees are still not included even in Discover Life. Being able to eliminate the CVās over-reach or over-generalizations would be very useful in this particular case.
Yes, this is a good topic. As with everything one would need to ask what the Objectives for doing it are. I am for doing it but really only use the ecoregions as a system for biologists to conserve the biodiversity within the ecoregion. There are so many overlapping biotic and abiotic entities that creating ecoregions would not be wholly for biological sake but for a systematic way to approach and conserve biodiversity. We really need strong conservation entities within each ecoregion and really, many conservation entities within each ecoregion if we do not want to lose our biodiversity to the invasives and lack of fire management. The ecoregions should also include marine ecosystems. A map of the earth would need to be debated and created and be made to be able to be changed/improved every ten years (in a big ol biologists convention)!!!
It would be useful to have the biogeogrphic realms/ecozones/regions available on iNat as places in the identify or expolre modes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogeographic_realm
Palearctic, Nearctic, Afrotropic, Neotropic, Australasia, Indomalaya, Oceania, Antarctic.
Is there a way to search for a taxon in the Afrotropical realm when identifying?
Or to create a project for the Afrotropics without adding manually 70 or so countries?
I would like to search/filter for certain taxa like this.
We def need distinct ocean biogeographic zones for IDing marine life. The W. Atlantic, E. Atlantic, E. Pacific are very distinct from the Indo-Pacific, but even subdividing these areas is better. Within the W. Atlantic there are several distinct biogeographic breaks. Even creating arbitrary breaks in better than nothing (like where the Indian Ocean āendsā)
I agree with this, though I confess exceptionally little experience with marine observations on iNat. There are many fewer marine observations than terrestrial (for many reasons), and I think supporting IDers here could help grow marine observations. While there are clear workarounds to largescale ārealmsā for terrestrial organisms (saved search URLs, projects - lots of these already exist), these arenāt as effective for marine regions because there are very few geopolitical subdivisions (ie, countries) to work with in the system. EEZ places help, but there are still major gaps. Coasts/mixing of terrestrial/marine observations are also an issue that is difficult to resolve. With the current levels of marine observations, some large marine places might not have as much of an impact/load on iNat as similarly sized terrestrial places (though I donāt definitely know thisā¦). In any case, if thereās the opportunity to add some large realms/regions to help with IDing, I think having marine ones could be beneficial.