Is there a way to identify the county in which an observation is made when the displayed location is other than a county?
Use case. I was asked about the distribution of Cypripedium acaule in Georgia (USA). My go-to resource only listed a few counties and it occurred to me to search iNat for observations.
Problem. If an observation is made within the jurisdiction of a town, National Forest etc., those are listed as the geographic location. In this case of towns, I could google the town name and get the county location. For locations such as National Forests, I had to consult a county map for Georgia and try to guess the county in which the observation had been made when it had been made near a county border in a National Forest that spanned several counties.
So my question is whether I’m missing some easy way to identify the county in these cases.
on the observation page, you can click on “details” below the map, and that should give you a little pop-up that includes Encompassing Places. that should tell you the county, according to iNaturalist. unfortunately, you won’t necessarily be able to see this during upload (only after the fact), and it’s also worth noting that sometimes the boundaries loaded in iNaturalist may be imprecise or inaccurate. so i wouldn’t rely on them alone if you really need to identify the correct county.
you can also download the observations in a CSV file, choosing to include the county name in the results. additionally, you can do what DriftlessRoots notes below.