I started using iNat last year and have since uploaded several (~20) observations in a wooded area in my neighborhood. It’s a very small area by a creek with a city owned golf course on the other side.
I noticed a couple of days ago that Google (and subsequently iNat, which I assume pulls GIS data from Google) has labeled this area as a park, with the oldest review being from 5 months ago.
I can’t find anything on the city parks website about this let alone anywhere else, so I was just curious if anyone knows more about this or has seen it happen as well.
To my knowledge, Google has no way to draw from iNaturalist observations. Even if they did, Google maps describes legal boundaries and would get into trouble for labeling something as a “park” just because of iNaturalist observations, so I doubt they would do that.
if you’re talking about Irvington Terrace Woods Park, it looks to me like this was added by a Google Maps “local guide”, which is just a rando who can, among other things, add random places to Google Maps. there’s no guarantee that this is a place that previously existed anywhere other than in that rando’s mind.
Having added places to Google Maps, I can tell you that they request documentation and it usually takes a few days before I get notified that my place has been accepted.
yeah iNat itself doesn’t automatically or manually incorporate info from Google in the Places database at least. iNat does use Google as a map background option, queries their database for locations on Explore, and on some platforms creates custom locality notes based on Google’s place descriptions (e.g. instead of just 25.65081, -80.40251, it might use Google to label an observation Three Lakes, FL 33186, USA instead). As far as I know all of that is done on the fly at the time of the search and observation creation not otherwise stored locally.
As someone who, as part of my job, regularly adds and occasionally removes parks and park features on Google Maps, I’ve never been requested to attach official or unofficial documentation. its park boundaries are often wildly incorrect and should never be trusted as a source of truth.
Google Maps for some years showed an otherwise non-existent park near my house in California. One had to cut through private yards to get to it (the neighbors were not happy), and it was just a sometimes-underwater bend of a creek bank, not even a different parcel than the rest of the creek. Some “rando” must have added it, and it took a good long time before Google took it down.