Hi! I am a iNat user, but a rookie project manager :) I work for a large city and we wish to create a projet including about 65 of our biggest parks (we have around 500 parks!). From what I have seen, those parks do not exist as Places on iNat (I’ve only checked for a few famous ones actually, to be honest, but of these don’t exist, the others certainly don’t)
What would be the best way to tackle this?
Is the only way to go is to create 65 places and add them to a projet? How do I create Places?
On could I just upload a file with all the 65 polygons and create a projet from that, even though polygons are not a continuous zone ?
Yes it is possible to add non-continuous polygons. Depending on you familarity with GIS tools it can be fairly easy. If you are e.g. using QGIS then dissolve (multiple features) or merge (multiple files) will work to create a layer with a single feature. This can then be exported as a kml and uploaded (assuming it meets the other criteria for iNat places in terms of area and number of observations contained).
You can also add each one separately but it will be tedious as users are limited to adding 3 places per day. For me I went through this pain in my own area because I wanted to track each park separately. But for an overview just one file will work fine.
If you are mapping the parks in Desktop Google Earth, you can select all of the polygons, right-click on one, and select “Combine into Multi Geometry.'”
This sounds like a worthwhile activity. Your approach will depend on what you want to get out of the project and whether that requires that you can distinguish observations in specific parks on iNat (you could always figure out which specific parks observations are in with post-processing).
If there are a lot of smaller parks, you would probably also want to keep in mind the limitations of iNat observations falling into small places. You can see existing threads on this and other project considerations on the forum.
My choice was to group 2-3 parks which are close to each other under the same place, in order to limit the number of new places created on the site, but at the same time keep those places meaningful because having all parks grouped under the same place would not say much about their name and location.
I am no expert in GIS tools, so I have used this site to draw the polygons and export the KML files. It’s free and very easy to use for newbies like me and it covers much more functionalities than what I needed for this project:
The other thread mentioned above also has very good advice and the main one which I also want to convey based on my own mistakes is to make sure the boundaries are not too strict. I have initially drawn my places very close to the official park boundaries and observations which are close to the edges and have low accuracy got left out… so it’s ok to include the streets around the park in your places to make sure all observations are taken into account. Good news is that it is easy to modify existing places and replace the KML with a new version.
Some government agencies have open GIS data. I got the boundaries for all city, county, state, and national parks in my city using open GIS data from city, county, state, and federal agencies.
Thanks to everyone, what a supportive community! I will definitely add all parks as places including a buffer zone to make sure observations on the edges of the parks are included. Three places a day is not so bad, I am patient.
