Hello, I am a new user, and I was wondering if anyone could help me understand the meanings of the different shades on this map. I see that pink is the range of the species, but that I also don’t quite understand because there are many observations in the southern tip of South Africa, but the range does not extend that far. As for the green, orange, and black shades, I know they are related to checklists, but I am not quite sure how, and I am wondering why Iraq and India change colors once they are zoomed in on.
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Welcome to the forum!
black = on the checklist, but manually marked absent
The colors on Iraq and India change when you zoom because the country-level statuses were set to absent, but the state-level statuses were not set to absent, so they changed colors based on observations.
E.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/284980933 is the observation that turned Madhya Pradesh green. (The observation doesn’t show on the map because the accuracy is too large and it’s considered unmappable.)
Note that place checklists are an older part of the site and are a little buggy – they often don’t update automatically, but you can force a refresh if you want.
The pink range map is sourced from IUCN, who is still marking cheetahs extinct in South Africa:
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but ‘Native to Southern Africa’ with almost 2K obs
Thank you for your response, I have a couple follow up questions if that’s ok. When you say that the “accuracy is too large”, is that because the user did not upload the GPS info with the photo? Also, what decides if an animal is added to a checklist? I see that The United States is shaded orange, but I don’t believe there are wild Cheetahs here, and I see that other countries have Observations w/o Media but are not shaded, such as Colombia. And finally, what decides if the country is set to absent, and why would an observation like the one you linked not override that?
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No, the user put in GPS info, but it included an accuracy value of 104.86 km. iNat doesn’t show observations on maps when they have large accuracy values, but the exact cutoff value depends on latitude:
Taxa can be manually added to checklists, or they can be auto-added by iNat. That’s the buggy part though – sometimes iNat fails to detect qualifying observations, so they never get added. And if it does get auto-added, but then the observation is deleted or made casual, or otherwise no longer qualifies, iNat won’t remove the taxon from the list. So I might guess that someone posted a zoo-housed cheetah in the US, and it went to RG and then got auto-added to the list before it got marked captive.
The system to detect qualifying observations is too resource-intensive to maintain, and staff actually said at one point that they would remove it, but it’s still limping along.
A user must have set it to absent. I don’t think the system was ever designed to have observations override a manually set absent occurrence status.
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There are a lot of things that work great on iNaturalist. Unfortunately, range maps and checklists are not among them.
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