Hello iNaturalist Community, I am a botanist at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, currently working on a checklist of the flora of the high Andes of Peru, defined here as areas above 4,500 m elevation. I am hoping to create and curate an iNaturalist project called “High Andean Flora of Peru”, wh…

Hello all, here is a final update on this thread. The project is live! It can be found here: Flora of High Andean Peru . I reached out to @marceloamores , who has made similar projects using complex geometry for the Páramos Ecuador project. He walked me through his workflow in Google Earth Engine an…

considering that there will already be some error introduced by the large accuracy radii of some observations, overly precise polygons might not help. especially if you’ll be studying species that are endangered and thus have their locations obscured. You might want to browse this discussion: http…

Thank you for your reply. For my work, I can only use observations with precise geolocations. None of my checklist species are formally protected, so their locations will not be obscured unless it is by the user.

The size limit for curators is 5mb, which 55mb is an order of magnitude larger than, so I don’t think a curator adding is an option. Staff have noted that highly complex places place a major strain on iNat’s infrastructure. If high resolution filtering is needed, I’d suggest making a buffered, less …

[image] magsylombard: Alternatively, would another curator be willing to create this place on my behalf? The size limit applies to everyone, so curators don’t have any special abilities here. [image] magsylombard: Does anyone have suggestions for how to address this issue? If you real…

FYI curators do get a bit of extra headroom on kml size limits (5mb vs. 1mb for regular users): https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000175019-how-to-make-a-place-on-inaturalist

This isn’t a solution to your issue, but you might be interested in the discussion of elevation data in this thread: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/altitude-and-feature-requests/51750/18?u=rupertclayton As a possible solution to your challenge with the KML file, perhaps you could break up the 4,50…

The polygon size limits are there so that no one can add a place that will have a severe negative impact on site performance. A 55mb file is far too complex to be added, I’m sorry.

In order to contribute a useful observation, there has to be geolocation x and y information. To the best of my information if x and y are available why should z (altitude) not be? Then you can filter your observations by altitude, and as I understood your request, that is what you require.

The interplay of observational accuracy and elevational gradients reduces the utility of your assumption on elevations. We can all think of examples–especially in the Andean region–where an x-y difference of just a hundred meters or so could make a difference in hundreds or thousands of meters of e…

Creating a project using a complex elevation polygon

General

jwidness February 5, 2026, 3:38pm 7

I recall (though I can’t find the source) that staff said not to split polygons up in order to circumvent the limits on place creation.

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Creating a project using a complex elevation polygon

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