I have created a project named “Itaú de Minas e sua Biodiversidade”, but the local selected in the map is wrong. On the map, the city of Itaú de Minas is pointed out in another location, a place called Santa Terezinha de Minas(Itatiuaçu). With the wrong place, all observations stay in other city. On the Google Maps, typing Itaú de Minas, the place is pointed out correctly, but not in the website, like images below. Can you help to fix it, please?
Places are added by users, check which place you need for the project, places on iNat are not what google shows you in a search. If there’s no place that fits you, create your own. https://www.inaturalist.org/places/new
There’s no places for this city on iNat.
So, if I understood, one user added a place and select the wrong city on the map, right? How can I know what user did this and how can I fix it, do you know?
If I add a place for my city, the name will be duplicated.
it looks like the source that iNaturalist uses for county-equivalent administrative areas has a lot of errors in Brazil, and Itaú de Minas is probably one of the places that has errors. iNat staff would probably have to fix the problem, but it probably needs to be fixed upstream at GADM, too, if it hasn’t already been fixed there.
according to the note at the bottom of the thread referenced above, it looks like you can visit the place page in iNaturalist and flag the place as needing correction.
Depends on what you need, old one should be changed as @pisum described it, but it’s also not a place for city, it’s marked as county, so if you want a place with city only, you likely have to add a new place (not sure how different those two are).
You can’t select a wrong place on the map, you either draw it or find a kml file, this is one of automatically added places that iNat system got (as well as country places, those can’t be added by users).
There’re more projects using this place, not only yours, so it may be worth asking project owner if they used the place for the name or for the actual map.
The place with the wrong name is a Standard Place, meaning it came from GADM and is supposed to represent a county-level place. It is both incorrect and outdated (it was wrong in the first place, then Brazil changed it’s county-level places in 2017, and GADM never updated). You can report the error in the topic that pisum linked, but the GADM information from Brazil has a LOT of errors and they’re probably not going to get fixed soon.
At any rate, you said you wanted to use a city for your project, and as Marina pointed out, cities have to be added by individual users – the Standard places are for countries, states, and counties. So you can safely ignore the place with the wrong name and add a new place for your city.
By the way, your city is currently within the county of Itabira on iNat. This place also has an error because it includes two counties under one name:
I think the easiest way for you to fix your project is to make a new “place” that is exactly the area you want to cover on the project. As this is a small place, this should not cause slow-down problems for iNaturalist. Here are the steps for doing that:
Using Google Earth, Google Maps, or a GIS application, draw a polygon for your boundaries and save it as a .kml file. I would give it a name like ItaudeMinasProject.kml so it wouldn’t be confused with the existing place files.
In iNaturalist, go to More–>Places–>Add a new place. Name your new place and import the .kml file that you created. Write down the name you gave this new place so you can use it in the next step.
Go back to your Project file, choose “Edit Project” and in the “Include Places” box, put the name of the place file you just made (not the .kml file name – the name you assigned it).
Although correcting the mistaken place files might be helpful, that might require permission from others, so just making a new place can be simpler.
