I’m not sure if this is a bug or just my issue, but sometimes I have great difficulty getting Washington state as the location to search. I type in “Washington” and the automatic options are Washington D.C., Washington PA, Washington NC, Washington MO, and Washington Street, Brooklyn. And if I just hit enter without picking an option, it sends me to the Washington Monument!
“Washington USA” gets the same options.
“Washington state” or “state of Washington” don’t work either.
When it’s not giving me the state of Washington as an option, what do I do?
Are you using the box labeled Location on the Explore page? That box is powered by Google and preferentially shows results closer to where the map is currently located. So on the east coast of the US, it shows eastern hits first, and on the west coast it will more easily find Washington state.
Another option is to use the Place search, found under Filters->More Filters. That is not biased by current location and only searches iNat-defined places.
Kind of a hidden feature, but if you just press enter/return on your keyboard after writing in a continent’s name, you’ll get iNat’s boundary for that continent. Pretty sure it only works with English names for continents. eg https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=97391&subview=map
I think if you add USA after whatever US state you type in, that gets you to the desired selection faster, if you don’t see that state option right away. But yeah, the options seem to be driven by what part of the world the Observations map is “looking at” at the time.
Okay, here’s something fascinating and strange. I played with the options and the “whatever the map is looking at” solution only works if you’re on observations view and looking at the map. I was on species view, trying to see which species were in each state, and even though my previous search was “Oregon” and thus the map was positioned very close to Washington, I still got the same unhelpful results. I changed to “Observations” but was on list view, still same unhelpful results. Then I changed to “map view” and got the helpful results.
I was trying to display the 15 most observed plant species in the State of Washington, USA, and encountered this problem. I was doing it from the state of Oregon (West Coast) and in the Species View. As @jonhakim pointed out, it’s very tough to get anything but unhelpful results for Washington when in Species View. Just typing “WA, USA” works though. But it’s a hack, not a fix, and very strange that it doesn’t seem to happen with any other state.
