How do I fix "Place geometry can't be blank" from trying to create a place?

[DT_Almquist]

I created a polygon in Google Earth and saved as a polygon. I’m getting the error “There were problems importing that place: Place geometry contains too many observations to import, Place geometry can’t be blank”. I’m skeptical that there are too many observations, as it’s mostly ocean and two adjacent/similar polys were accepted, and am wondering if maybe that error is because the geometry is messed up. In searching the forum I found some similar issues that were identified by opening in Notepad and this is from that file if it helps, although when I post, it takes out the tags.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> Florida offshore C SW peninsula.kml normal #sn_ylw-pushpin0 highlight #sh_ylw-pushpin 1.3 http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/kml/pushpin/ylw-pushpin.png ff0055ff ff0055ff 1.1 http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/kml/pushpin/ylw-pushpin.png ff0055ff ff0055ff Florida offshore C SW peninsula #msn_ylw-pushpin 1 -84.78128235973706,26.87939942754425,0 -84.46773846935426,25.6612008346398,0 -82.00016374942338,26.58697042301221,0 -82.70932460814177,27.73217232304446,0 -82.77383044728522,28.29862195350928,0 -84.78128235973706,26.87939942754425,0

[DT_Almquist]

[jwidness]

I would strongly suspect it really is too many observations. If you look at how many observations Manatee and Hillsborough Counties have on iNat, it’s about 250,000.

On GBIF (which is only getting the subset that are RG and appropriately licensed), Manatee and Hillsborough Counties have about 110,000 obs.

So around here, it looks like iNat has around 2.5 times as many obs as GBIF. Uploading your shape to GBIF shows ~116,000 observations, thus it seems likely your shape encompasses more than 200,000 observations on iNat, exceeding the limit.

[DT_Almquist]

Wow, nice sleuthing and thank you! It looks like the highest concentration of records is right along the coast, so I wonder if I can get the iNat FL boundary into Google Earth and redraw my poly so that it barely goes over that if that will exclude enough.

[DT_Almquist]

Yes, reducing my polygon along the shoreline to barely overlap the Florida, USA iNat boundary worked! It would be nice if the error message only had the part about the too many occurrences, as that was the actual issue.