How do I filter for my own pinned locations that aren't in the iNat database?

General
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Hi Hi, Thanking everyone in advance for their suggestions.

I’m working on a very small cluster of islands in the Celebes Sea and would like to compare our datasets between islands. Eg. Butterflyfish on PomPom vs Butterflyfish on Mataking.

I can set my pinned locations to the right island, but they’re too small to be iNat locations.

Is there some way I can filter for my pinned locations?

I can do this in the map page by zooming right right right in and getting a bounding box that only contains the island I’m interested in. This is problematic for a couple of reasons. Firstly the computer screen window is East-West wide and my islands tend to be North-South long. So if I have the whole island in the bounding box, I also have the island to the east or west of it. Secondly, at this level of zoom the site gets a bit panicky and suddenly relocates me to Uzbekistan or somewhere. Thirdly, this is a really time consuming way to compare half a dozen sites.

Also, if I just set the location as Pom Pom, without it being a pre-set location, the AI guesses where I mean and creates a bounding box. In this case, it is specific to Pom-Pom Island Resort, and contains no butterflyfish at all. Similarly, if I search for Sipadan, I get a box around a resort on Kapalai which is 20km from where I was trying to look.

Any advice?

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You should create places for each island and sea around it, they can’t be too small, you can create a place for your yard, so even the smallest island should take enough place.

2 Likes
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Look at the URL and you will see that the bounding box is set by using 4 lat/long coordinates for the corners of the box. You can make changes to the lat/long to end up with a more square box. Alternatively there is a way to change the URL to make the boundary using a single lat/long point as the center of a circle of a defined radius. Once you get the box or circle around your island you can bookmark the URL. I don’t remember how to write the URL to search in a circle. I have the URL bookmarked on my laptop but I’m on my phone right now. If someone else doesn’t post it before me, I will post it here in the morning (US time).

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To give you an approximate bounding box, you can resize your window (map view) to the shape that’s best (including slightly north/south long) and then click the orange “redo search in map” button. But @fffffffff’s suggestion may be best as you can create whatever shaped boundary you’d like.

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So I was wrong about the bounding box. It only uses two points, the northeast and southwest corners of the box. I see that there is a place for Borneo island but it doesn’t include the surrounding water.

I made this box around Borneo: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?nelat=8&nelng=120&place_id=any&subview=map&swlat=-4.6&swlng=108.4&user_id=tracc
I also made a circle around Borneo: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&lat=2.2&lng=114.2&radius=775&user_id=tracc
If you only plan to make observations in the Malaysian part of the island, the box or circle can be smaller.
Here is a box around peninsular Malaysian (and Singapore): https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?nelat=7.5&nelng=105.5&place_id=any&subview=map&swlat=-1&swlng=98.5&user_id=tracc

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