Gulf of Mexico renamed to Gulf of America on Google Maps baselayer

[Quercitron]

@calvertm

My understanding is that place names in the US are officially determined by the US Board on Geographic Names.

Evidently, the name was officially changed via the prescribed procedure. Following is a quote from USGS: National Map that is displayed on that page as of the time of this writing (February 11, 2025, 7:32 PM EST):

Per Secretarial Order 3423, the Gulf of Mexico has been renamed to the Gulf of America. The display map for the Gazetteer application is in the process of being updated to reflect this name change.

So, whether or not we view it is a good decision, it does appear to be official.

[Quercitron]

@Quercitron

The display map for the Gazetteer application is in the process of being updated to reflect this name change.

Below is an image capture with the map still displaying the name as “Gulf of Mexico”:

[tiwane]

We did some digging and iNat was using the locale of one’s browser to localize maps. We made an update that now uses your account locale (the one you can choose in Account Settings or at the locale picker in the footer) for map localization and I think do see some changes. If I chooseEspañol (Mexico) I see this:

If I choose English (UK) I see this:

The other languages I’ve tried, English, French, German, Español and Japanese only show Gulf of America.

I’m going to close this topic for a few days. People are still making off-topic posts that are not constructive, and I think it would be prudent to see what things are like in a few days once Google’s updates are fully rolled out and we have some time to do a little more digging about a potential global map default.

[oksanaetal]

Huh? Why is this topic open again?

[eyekosaeder]

@tiwane

We did some digging and iNat was using the locale of one’s browser to localize maps. We made an update that now uses your account locale

@tiwane

The other languages I’ve tried, English, French, German, Español and Japanese only show Gulf of America

Thank you for changing this! It’s interesting to me that the Google Maps locale for Germany displays only Gulf of America on iNat, while it displayed as Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America) on the actual Google maps site. Do you have any idea why that may be? It would be interesting to know whether people from the UK already saw the double-name before.

@tiwane

If I choose English (UK) I see this:

Same for me. Luckily that’s the locale I’m using. Like I said, it’s weird that for the other languages it doesn’t work (or at least didn’t 2 days ago), but that seems to be an issue on Google’s part

[papernautilus]

Down here in Ecuador, it says “Gulf of America.” If I switch to Mexican Spanish, it is “Golfo de México.” In Colombian, Costa Rican or Argentine Spanish, it is “Golfo de México (Golfo de América).” In plain old generic Spanish, it is “Golfo de América.”

[tiwane]

@oksanaetal

Why is this topic open again?

As I said above, I closed it for a few days. However, if there’s nothing new to move the discussion forward about what options iNat has, I might close it again. I’ve already hidden one new post that wasn’t on topic. I think probaly the next step would be for us to explore what @pisum linked to.

[songbird82894]

There are literally no observations there and it is just ocean so I don’t get what the problem is.

[eyekosaeder]

There are, actually. I just set the filter to a terrestrial taxon because the observations were covering up the name.
The issue is that the name is not correct anywhere outside the US, and it also tied in with the US-data purge topic, I linked to in my original post.

Also, the place names are still all set to “Gulf of Mexico” and I don’t see them changing, so at least having both names makes practical sense. Here’s the map view with observations from the Place “Gulf of Mexico”:

[papernautilus]

A quick look at the map shows thousands of observations in the gulf. And to dismiss it as “just ocean” is beyond incredible.

[songbird82894]

Okay. Then I see a problem with it because there could be glitches and stuff but it would probably be resolved after a while.

[sethshively]

Maybe there could be something like how inat recognizes multiple common names for certain organisms (for example searching “elephant stag beetle” brings up the page for the giant stag beetle). “Gulf of America” and “Gulf of Mexico” could be marked as synonyms when searching for the place name

[eyekosaeder]

Places are usually user-generated, which makes this difficult, I think. And duplicates aren’t ideal, especially big ones like this, as they are very demanding on iNat’s infrastructure.

This is generally, why I agree with those who say it’s better if iNat used the standard international map, rather than switching it up for sensitive countries.

[jasonhernandez74]

@eyekosaeder

This is generally, why I agree with those who say it’s better if iNat used the standard international map,

Well, the question was brought up earlier:

@pisum

@tiwane

Google Maps shows different maps for different countries. Is there a single “global” version of it?

there is a base version of Google Maps, and i think it’s basically what we see in maps on the iNat website currently.

Given that this is what tiwane seems to have meant by “what pisum linked to,” it seems the question comes down to what does the “base version” say? And would it work for people using different languages and/or different geographic locales?

[pisum]

@jasonhernandez74

“what pisum linked to,”

the link is this:

@pisum

more information about localization options in the Google Maps API is available here, in case folks really want to dig into the nuts and bolts of it: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/localization

remember what i said initially. in G Maps, there are a few different ways to apply localization. it looks like iNat has tried to apply language localization, using iNat’s locales rather than applying your browser’s locales. but this will only get you so far, especially when your language has no locale. (for example, Spanish has no locale, but Spanish-Mexico has a locale.) for the GOM / GOA issue, you really need to apply regional localization rather than just relying on language localization. so i assume regional localization is the thing that iNat staff are looking into.

but as i noted before:

@pisum

actually making the request for regionally localized data doesn’t seem like it’ll be the hard part. as noted earlier, the hard part probably is implementing a way to determine which is the correct region localization appropriate for any given user.