When using the website the boundaries of the Northwest Territories, Canada are not set to the actual borders of the territories. When limiting observations by that area it appears to just use the highest and lowest coordinates to form a large rectangle. This results in observations from the Yukon and Nunavut to be included in the search. It is properly bounded when used on the Android app though.
welcome to the forum :)
Heads up that this is not a bug, but rather a function of iNat having two different ways to search for places/locations
In the Explore page, you’re searching for NW Territories using this search bar, which is searching in Google Maps
What you’re looking for (and what you’re doing in the app), is to search for an explicit ‘place’ within iNat with accurately defined borders. You can find your place in two ways:
-
Search in the top left bar
-
In explore, click filters → more filters → search in the place bar
1 Like
Thanks. It is interesting though since all the other provinces and territories have accurately defined boundaries when using just the regular explore search page. Northwest Territories is the only one where you would need to use an extra step.
1 Like
Just to be totally transparent (if perhaps a little too deep in the weeds), I’m pretty sure there is an actual bug, or at least some unexpected behavior. If you use the Location box, then when iNat looks for a place, it cuts off the search at 20 characters, so when you look for something with a longer name, it gives up and just uses the rectangle that it gets from Google. Northwest Territories is one character too long. Newfoundland and Labrador is way too long and also gives a rectangle when searching from Location (but the correct boundary when using Filters->More Filters->Place).
Alberta works fine from the Location search.
1 Like