Filter location: United States

Bug Reports
1

When I filter for the location “USA” or “United States” it shows the observations of “USACE Overlook at Joe Pool Lake”

2

Maybe other filters impact this? Both USA and United States work fine for me, can you show screenshots?

3

There are 2 different types of places in inat. I wont go into technical details or a long explanation of why; but one is from Google maps, the other internal to inat.

For this there are 2 separate search functions. Don’t use the one marked location that is prominent on the top right. Rather click on the filters button; choose more and then use the one there. That will get you what you want

3 Likes
4

Hey, this is marked as “resolved” when I really don’t think it should be thought of as resolved by the devs.

If the most obvious way of doing something doesn’t work, and you have to use the hidden way, even though you still have a way to do it then the first thing not working is a bug, no? Or at least a design flaw.

5

It is not a bug, it is acting as designed and intended.

The site has 2 different notions of place. The one that the original person was asking about uses the Google maps version, and control of names etc of those places is outside the control of iNat. INat has no control over someone adding an alias of ‘USA’ to a specific park in Texas in Google Maps.

There are arguments to be made plus or minus in terms of which one of the two filters should be in which place, but the site has chosen to place the one which has more things in it (iNat is not a GIS system and can not in any way store the same amount of geographic info or places as Google maps does) as the more ‘obvious’ one.

One could just as much state were the decision reversed and the iNat one placed more prominently that when someone cant find something that is in the Google maps places but not the internal inat ones that it is a bug.

1 Like
6

This is a common issue that will hopefully be addressed when the Explore page is redesigned. Please share your thoughts on that here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ideas-for-a-revamped-explore-observations-search-page/8439