Bounding box does not exclude observations that should be excluded

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Platform: Website

Browser, if a website issue: Chrome

Not entirely certain what’s going wrong here, but I was looking at my own observations and playing around with the bounding box when this happened: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?nelat=-8&nelng=-190&place_id=any&subview=map&swlat=-46&swlng=109&user_id=matthew_connors&verifiable=any

I can think of no good reason why those easternmost observations from Fiji are inexplicably included in the search despite being well outside the box. The numbers of sightings and species are as they would be expected if there was no box, so it’s not just a loading issue either. It works when I am logged out as well. Happy to provide more info if needed but hopefully this is enough to work out what’s going wrong!

I suspect that it has to do with your longitude range including a large west (negative) value (-190) – while the bounding box is drawn correctly, the search seems to mess up. When I substitute the equivalent lon = 170 for -190, those observations disappear:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?nelat=-8&nelng=170&place_id=any&subview=map&swlat=-46&swlng=109&user_id=matthew_connors&verifiable=any

Definitely a bug in lat/lon searches, but I’d guess it can be avoided by keeping longitudes in the range of -180 to +180.

2 Likes

Ahh I see, yes that would make sense