I’m in Canada so when I visit Google Maps directly I see “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”, but on iNaturalist I see the American version, i.e. “Gulf of America” with no qualifiers.
I assume this is because iNaturalist is pulling a specific American version of the map, not whatever matches the user. Since it’s probably a challenge to add a layer of maps localization to iNat, I have an alternative proposal:
Could iNaturalist please switch to the Mexican version of Google Maps for its base layer?
I’m in Canada, but I’ll reach out to the administrator of the Canada project and see what they can do. At the very least we shouldn’t be using the American one; I’d most prefer the Mexican version, but I’d rather see the clunky two-name display than what Google is showing USians.
In Poland we have official Commission for the Standardization of Geographical Names Outside the Borders of the Republic of Poland and their statement you can find here: https://www.gov.pl/web/ksng/nazwa-zatoki-meksykanskiej
In short: they don’t recommend using “Gulf of America” (Zatoka Amerykańska), as this name was not officially accepted even in US (it’s just a project) and - what more important - to change the name in international institutions (like IHO) all countries surrounding the gulf should agree to change the name. And I think the statement of our Commision, based on international law, is just wise.
But on Polish version of Google maps we see double name (American in brackets). (edit: on iNaturalist only Gulf of America)
My understanding is that Google displays different borders and names for some disputed regions depending on which country you’re accessing the map from and what they believe the border is, as others have pointed out. Those decisions are made by Google, it’s not really something iNat has control over. As for which maps are accessed by iNat for which users, I’m not sure exactly how that works or how it can be updated at this time.
To be clear, this particular name change on Google’s end doesn’t affect the coordinates attached to iNat observations, nor does it affect the names of iNat Places that observations are indexed in, so it doesn’t have any actual effect on the functionality of iNat or how iNat indexes things at a political level.
I/m in the UK (Liverpool) and the map on projects I created shows as “Gulf of America” with no other annotation showing as the correct (IMHO) “Gulf of Mexico”. If this could be changed ASAP then I would be grateful.
Currently kind of confusing since the iphone app still calls it Gulf of Mexico, but the website calls it Gulf of America. The name change isn’t that big a deal imo, although kind of amusing. Politicians changing names of geographic features based on ideological reasons is nothing new
This is very annoying. However, it is also one of the many red herrings put out to distract us from more substantial issues. Lets deal with those and fix these minor issues later.
