Butte County bounding box incorrect

Bug Reports
1

The bounding box for Butte County, California is incorrect:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?nelat=39.6531819&nelng=-121.5382988&place_id=any&swlat=39.6359982&swlng=-121.57031360000002

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2

Searching for “Butte” and filtering for places should bring you to these results:
https://www.inaturalist.org/search?q=butte&source[]=places

The proper county boundary can be found here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=1482

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3

Hi Carrie. I think there’s a genuine bug here that I have encountered myself. Try this:

  1. Go to “Explore” and type “Butte County” in the Location Box.
  2. Select “Butte County CA, USA”

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  1. You get the 4 results from that same small bounding box in Butte Valley, CA that @ aaronliston mentioned.
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4

the Explore page is a little confusing because it offers that location box. that location box does not actually pull the “places” defined in iNaturalist. it uses some other source (Google?). to filter by the places in iNaturalist in the Explore page, click on the filters button, then more filters, then pick your place from the place box (different from that location box).

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5

Thanks @pisum. It’s good to know the workaround of specifying a Location via Filters > More Filters. But the Butte County issue is real. If I use Explore > Location to examine observations of a taxon specific to any other California county (e.g. Plumas County, Sonoma County) it works fine, but if I specify Butte County iNat erroneously brings up that tiny bounding box.

@carrieseltzer: Can you mark this bug as open? I’m pretty sure most iNat users are going to expect that they can type a county name into the Location box as that works for almost all other places.

6

i think the place box is actually the preferred place filter, and the location box is the workaround if the place doesn’t exist. it’s not obvious, but maybe they’ll fix it one day when they finally update the Explore page.

if you go to https://maps.google.com, search for Butte County, California, you’ll see it does the same thing, zooming in to a small box around Butte Valley. but if you look for just Butte County, it’ll show you the whole county. so the issue is with Google data, not iNaturalist (other than a confusing place / location UI). see https://support.google.com/maps/answer/3094088?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en for how to report issues about Google Maps.

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7

Thanks @pisum. That’s very helpful.

I feel that users’ expectation may not be that the Location search would use Google places rather than iNat locations.

I filed an error report with Google Maps to try to get the Butte County issue corrected.

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8

I changed the solution from mine to @pisum’s. Apologies for the delay.

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