I am trying to set up a bounding box for a parcel of property that our resort owns, for the purpose of guests and and employees documenting species, organizing bioblitz’s, etc… When I searched our location to see if nearby bounding boxes (locations) had been already been created, I discovered that one near our location had already been created. However, it is named, using our trademarked business name (Keweenaw Mountain Lodge), but the bounding box itself is grossly incorrect for our property boundary.
The entirety of the first image below better represents the actual boundary of our property. The second image shows the overall general area, in which the first image would be inset.
I would like to do one of three things to get this corrected - but I do not know how (or if I even can).
Is it possible for me to make changes to a bounding box that was not created by me?
Is it possible to create a new bounding box that uses our business name, even though that has already been used by someone else?
Is it possible for me to learn who created the falsely named bounding box so I can contact them to collaborate on getting it corrected (i.e., more accurate for representing the property boundaries)?
Is it possible to have the name of the incorrect bounding box (created by someone else or by some other means) changed because it is using a registered, trademarked name and is not correctly representing the business.
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated, I really like the iNaturalist platform and want to make using it an integrated portion of our companies environmental/ecological initiatives. However, if I can’t get this aspect solved, it will not serve our needs.
many users often mistake the locations provided by Google for the places that are stored within iNat itself. in this case, i’m fairly certain your bounding box is coming from Google. i suggest reading this thread (or another one of i’m sure many, many others) to get more information on the difference: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/butte-county-bounding-box-incorrect/8034/4.
if you want a proper representation of your property, you have 2 choices. if you plan to create a project in iNat at some point or if you want to make it possible to get notifications for your place, it’s probably best to create a new place in iNaturalist.
otherwise, if you want make sure the Google bounding box is properly depicted, you can contact Google using a link in the thread i noted above. (also, sometimes Google sources locations from OpenStreetMaps. i didn’t check, but if that’s the case here, you could also just try to correct the location defined in OSM before contacting Google. that might speed up the process for correcting the Google place.)
Thanks for the quick response and synopsis. I did a search for the “Place” and it did not come up with its own page…so I suspect this is something that has been the result of Google’s data and that I’ll have to go the route of having that fixed.
Thank you very much for the information. After doing some deeper digging, I think you are correct about this having not been created by a user but uploaded form an external data set (e.g., Google). One question about that, though…when I Google our name in Google Maps, it brings me to a pin for our location but it doesn’t show a bounding box like it does in iNaturalist. Is this the way it works for all locations brought in using Google’s data? (I noticed that a nearby state park has the same type of pin in Google Maps; yet, I am able to get two different bounding boxes in iNaturalist depending on how I search for the place - one of the boxes is similar to the one I get for our location (presumably Google Maps based) and a different bounding box created by a user, which is precise to the park boundary.)
I think I am working toward understanding this better…again, thank you for your help.
the boundaries for the Google location probably are sourced from the building outline (for the lodge) in OSM: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/219557915. so i’m just guessing, but if you want changes in Google, it’s probably fastest to make the changes (or create a place to reflect the whole property) in OSM (first).
