Within the Nearctic region, there is tundra, taiga, desert, grassland, and broadleaf forest. The Afrotropical region encompasses both the Congo rainforest and the Namib desert. Biogeographical regions can span multiple biomes, the bioregions the biomes characterize, and the ecoregions within the bioregions. If we want to look at those scales, we scale down from the biogeographical region to the appropriate level.
I think Simon added Afrotropic ecozone as a place - I use it in my default grid list of photos - e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?photos=true&taxon_id=48195&preferred_place_id=97392
place_id=97392 is just the standard place in iNat for the continent of Africa.
I am very happy to hear this - thank you
you might be misunderstanding my previous post. place 97392 is Africa, not Afrotropics.
Place ID for Afrotropic ecozone:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=59647&subview=map
Hi iNat users! I’m not very experienced at using the more advanced iNat features so let me know if I’m missing a solution that already exists.
I’m using iNat as a resource to very quickly look through observations in certain biogeographic regions which don’t necessary follow political boundaries and therefore aren’t currently searchable as shapefiles in the explore page. Think “Andes Mountain Range”, “Yucatan Peninsula”, “Oceania”, etc., which would be super helpful in looking into how species are distributed within hotspots of endemism within the larger continent, for example.
You can currently search some such terms even when not listed as “places”, but many still don’t exist and where they do, it’s always a rectangular area, which of course no real biogeographic region looks like. For example, Southeast Asia (where I’m from) is often broadly categorized into 4 major biogeographic regions:
Figure from Sodhi et al., 2004 (Southeast Asian biodiversity: an impending disaster)
I’d love to be able to search “Sundaland” in the Explore tab and filter observations down to this non-rectangular area. Or the Himalayan Mountain range which crosses borders, or the Visayas Islands which comprise multiple islands within one country, or the Gobi desert, or… I think you get what I mean.
I understand it’s always going to be tricky as I’m sure there is no perfect consensus on which regions extend to exactly where (“Coral triangle”, for example), but it would be great if one day this could happen. In my opinion it would make iNat really useful for researchers to understand evolutionary patterns across and within habitat types, environmental regimes, etc.,
Welcome to the iNat Forum!
Adding larger places analogous to biogeographic realms (though the terminology varies slightly) has been a common topic on the forum, so I’ve added your post to this previous thread and reopened it. This thread and links in the comments above will have a lot of info about why many large places aren’t on iNat and ways that users get around this (using combinations of places, projects, etc.).
A good response from staff about one of the main reasons why these places aren’t on iNat is:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/implement-standard-marine-places-for-the-worlds-oceans/1458/14
On a side note, when submitting a Feature Request (which the post above was initially submitted as), please be sure to fill out the required template. Requests generally won’t be approved if it is not completed.