Step 1: Friends and I were discussing the range of cottonmouths in our area. The legend is misleading. Here, blue squares correspond to captive specimens (not vertebrates) and red to wild observations (not invertebrates). The shaded areas have no description at all, though I infer that red is “commonly observed” and yellow and green are reported in the literature with varying degrees of frequency.
click on the layer selector in the top-right corner of the map, and that will tell you what the different colored markers and areas represent. you’ll be able to toggle the visibility of each of the layers from there, too.
the map legend seems a little bit outdated. i assume it was once more or less accurate, but then they split things into different layers and changed the marker appearance at different zoom levels, and now it’s not as accurate. i would be tempted to just get rid of the old map legend altogether. it seems like nowadays it is useful to describe only the different quality grade and geoprivacy markers at high zoom levels.
The map in your example is zoomed out to the extent that the individual map-pins (to which the legend refers) are aggregated and displayed as red squares. Is that intentional, or do you see a problem when you zoom in to see the pins?
the green / yellow areas are “standard” places in the system where the taxon occurs on the place checklist. you can toggle these on and off by checking and unchecking the “Checklist Places” layer in the layer selector.
More importantly, where does a person go to find the meanings of the map symbols, other than the forum. Ideally, there will at least be a link from the map.
