Let me explain that title!
I created KLM for 60 parks of my city and started uploading them to iNat as places with the idea to create a projet with all those parks in it.
As suggested, I added a buffer of 100m around the park limits to account for a certain level of imprecision in the geolocalisation of observations made to the edge of the parks.
I now realize quite a few parks are contiguous. Meaning the buffer zones of the parks in this situtation are overlapping with its neighbor. That means that an observation made in the overlapping areas would be considered observed in two places at the same time, right?
And does that mean that if I create a projet with all those places, an observation in this situation would be counted twice?
I hope my question is clear and I thank you in advance!
I think if you have one project with all the locations, it will only be counted once.
If you made a collection project for each place and then an umbrella project for all of the individual collection projects, I’m not sure what would happen.
If you have the second, you could make a test observation and see.
note that it’s possible that, even with your place buffers, an observation whose coordinates fall within two places but whose accuracy value extends beyond the bounding box of the individual places but is contained within the combined bounding box would still be excluded from both places and therefore be excluded from the project.
as cthawley notes, if in doubt, you can always create dummy observations to see exactly what happens.
Thanks for you response. What if I export the data because I want to further analyse it, for exemple to compare the different parks? Would those observations then appear twice in the database?
Observations appear once in an export. But yeah if you do multiple exports (say one for each place), it could appear more than once if you are separately merging those datasets together in external software.