Custom Boundary for East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana in Explore is inaccurate

[pttrsn]

Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Chrome, Firefox (does not seem browser-specific)

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?nelat=30.71945804837576&nelng=-90.84418096075521&place_id=any&subview=map&swlat=30.3124690347364&swlng=-91.31656503226932

https://www.inaturalist.org/places/east-baton-rouge-county

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=2208&subview=map

Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):

Step 1: Search for “East Baton Rouge Parish” in Explore and see that the results are shown in a Custom Boundary square box instead of the actual parish borders. (Note that the URL has place_id=any)

Step 2: View the About page for East Baton Rouge Parish and see that the boundary shown there is an accurate map of the borders.

Step 3: Click on “View more observations from this place” in the Observations tab of the About page, and it will take you to an Explore map with the appropriate parish borders as a boundary (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=2208&subview=map)

I’m not sure why these would be different, but the Custom Boundary on the Explore page is including observations from nearby parishes which is of course not ideal or accurate. Spot-checking other nearby parishes in Louisiana, West Baton Rouge, West Feliciana, and East Feliciana parishes also have this problem, but not Ascension, Livingston, Orleans or Jefferson parishes.

That you can get to the proper Explore map via the About page (which uses the place_id) seems to implicate the Search functionality somehow – it’s not sending me to the actual place.

Could this be related to the place_county_name problem mentioned in this Github issue? https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/issues/3570

Any help is appreciated and apologies if this is some obvious limitation.

Thank you!

[pisum]

not sure this is a bug exactly, or at least this is something that is a frequent source of confusion / frustration that i’m sure is on some long-term roadmap to address.

for now, instead of using the location box next to the species box to search for a place, use filters > more filters > place, or this: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=2208&subview=map

there are lots of existing threads that go over the difference between location and place in the Explore page. you can search the forum, or maybe try one like this: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/bounding-box-vs-shapes-when-selecting-by-country/33709.

[pttrsn]

Thank you, I tried searching the Forums but I guess I was looking for something too specific to Louisiana.

[jwidness]

The specific issue here is the names are too long – iNat cuts off location searches with more than 20 characters, see https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/boundaries-of-the-northwest-territories/40001/4

Personally, I think that’s a bug, but it’s not really my decision.