When I search for “Chuquisaca” from the Explore tab all I get is a bounding box, which far exceeds the Department’s area, yet when I do the same from Places I get the correct boundary. This is strange since when I do the same for “Tarija” I get the correct outline in both cases. Is there someway I …

Geography info is stored in 2 places on the site. The explore search uses Google Maps. The site has no control over the names or definitions of the area used. Some places are stored internally on the inat database. If your place exists here, it is always better to use these. Use the place search wh…

[image] mrtnlowr: Is there someway I can correct the Explore behaviour for Chuquisaca? [image] See bottom left of the Filters panel. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=6788

So when I search for “Tarija” in Explore and get an iNat place_id with the correct boundary I’m assuming that’s because Google doesn’t have a BB for Tarija.

Tarija appears to be a department and a city within the department. Both are mapped in Google Maps Department City How inat places and google places are linked to each other based on a name search, I dont know.

Is there anything we can do when place names are misleadingly used or incorrectly defined? The place Austin, TX, USA is incorrectly/misleadingly defined. When I select “Austin, TX, USA (TOWN)” in Place when searching or in Location in Explore, I get the area shown in the map as the Austin Nature an…

It’s one of those cases with no good answer. The site cant store and manage every piece of geographical data. It’s not computationally possible for inat to add every park, town boundaries etc into their database. For Google and Google Maps, it is easy. The challenge is then you interact with the na…

It would not have occured to me that the “Locations” and “Place” would be so drastically different. As it is it seems like “place” may be a better default and it might be a good idea to put that where the location field is now?

Not really, it’s better in theory, but in practice there’re much more searh options in locations.

[image] cmcheatle: It’s one of those cases with no good answer. Actually, I think my question is slightly different. I’m not asking that we individually define every place. I’m asking whether we can get the misleading place names corrected. For example, the Austin, TX, US place isn’t actuall…

[image] jbecky: Is there a way to look up who defined a place so we could ask them to change it? look at the bottom-left corner of any place page, and you’ll see who created it, if the creator is recorded. the issue with Austin is that there’s a point place “Austin” which nobody but staff (pr…

Explore vs. Places: different boundaries, why?

General

Topic		Replies	Views
Searching for observations in a city returns observations for a specific land feature within the city General web	49	1594	December 9, 2023
Location search in Explore returns wrong place Bug Reports	5	322	March 20, 2024
Clarity on Place search behavior General web , question	6	189	July 22, 2024
Searching for a city only gives a city park (Austin, TX, USA) Bug Reports	4	419	June 27, 2021
User-defined places not searchable in Explore Bug Reports	3	467	June 27, 2021

Explore vs. Places: different boundaries, why?

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