I suppose whoever communicates with Google about this should ask them who or what entity they consider to have official authority over names of places. Governments are larger than just one person. Courts may sometimes need to get involved.
We should not get too deeply into the politics here. This issue is already quite complicated.
And then, before you know it, any document that refers to the Gulf of Mexico will be banned from libraries, schools and universities.
Perhaps there will now by a push to rename my state (New Mexico). Of course we wouldnât stand for it.
Google does provide the map data, but the data is localizable. iNat should be able to request a regionally localized version of the data, but iNat probably would need some mechanism to figure out your location first.
one way to do that would be for iNat to get your IP address and ping some sort of IP location service to determine where you are.
another way to do that would be to have you specify your location in your account settings. (this could be an override for the IP method if they wanted to do both.)
it looks like the Google Maps platform will automatically change the language of the labels in the maps based on your browserâs language settings. but thatâs different from the region localization that is also possible.
i didnât dig into the iNat source code. so itâs not clear to me if they have ever tried to do the region localization, but it doesnât seem like theyâre currently doing that â probably because they havenât implemented a mechanism that would figure out where users are actually located.
for regional versions of iNat, they might be able to apply a blanket regional localization in the absence of the global version of the site handling the localization. so thatâs something that might be possible in the interim, though it wouldnât help everyone.
While weâre renaming things, we can just change the North-Atlantic to Gulf of Iceland. (Everythingâs a gulf if you zoom out far enough.)
Weâd have to change NATO to GOITO too, which sounds a bit silly, but thatâs a sacrifice Iâm willing to make.
Next, heâll be âofficiallyâ renaming any organism with the specific epithet âcanadensisâ or âmexicana.â
I am an active contributor to Google Maps and found that what can be added, edited, reviewed or uploaded depends on the jurisdiction and varies between countries and states.
It is called River Murray in South Australia and Murray River upstream. This is a historic difference that is reflected on Google Maps.
A lot of geographic locations changed names recently. The river that flows through Adelaide has a different name at different local council areas.
Geography has been politicised during the last couple of years and I expect it to get worse until we have an outbreak of common sense.
I wonder if this⌠strangeness going on in my country is going to end up changing any common names, such as the Gulf of Mexico Whale.
Donât we already have an iNat setting for locale? Currently if we view the species list in Explore either without a place filter or with a custom one, the native/introduced status is determined based on our location. Could that be linked to the map we see?
And about that (sad) Gulf.
âWe actually havenât found one oil-free fish yet,â said Murawski in 2020.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/03/trump-gulf-of-mexico
I hope youâre not holding your breath!!?? ;-)
locale is mostly for language â like a subcategory for languages â i think. i donât think you would want to try to adapt that to use for map regional localization purposes. it would be cleaner probably to have a separate mechanism for map regional localization.
I like how Google Maps works on iNaturalist. I just want the MX platform to use the Google maps we see here.
(edit to clarify I mean only the MX platform.)
No, but there is hope herd immunity does not take hold.
I think that wonât happen. These names are down to the ICN, ICZN, etc.
Unless of course, the US decides to back out of those, which would be pure chaos. Letâs just hope that wonât happen
People can call it what they like. I donât think it would matter if it was renamed to âGulf of Madagascar but Without Madagascarâ, itâs still the same body of water.
The Gulf of America thing seems like a bad parody but is apparently a serious thing that was thought necessary. I am usually not a fan of renaming things with a long history, and humans have multiple established names for many things (water bodies, mountains, regions) just like organisms on iNaturalist. However, the Gulf of Mexico was NEVER called âGulf of Americaâ at any point and has a HUGE presence in the published literature from history to biology. There was no push or need to change that name as it is not offensive. It just screams insecure narcissism, if anything.
Iâm off the soapbox. As of now Iâm not sure where I fall politically where I donât feel you need a Gulf of America OR a Spongy Moth. Both are unnecessary.
There have always been problems with name changes on Google, and also with other things such as borders. This is not something new. Google has always stood with the powerful and rich, as it was shown in the past with the mapping of Palestine. Itâs not new that Google stands with the US colonialist regime, be it Bush, Obama, Biden, or Trump.
The issue is that as a community science site, there has to be some common foundation in terms of the words we use to describe things.
If everyone started talking in a separate type of newspeak that was considered doubleplusgood to upsub to whoever their bb was, then data would become far less useful or useable.
The basis of cooperation is understanding and the basis of understanding is agreeing that words mean a certain thing.
But that wonât stop scientific bodies led by compromised individuals from âjust following ordersâ.
