Type “Savannah, GA” into the search bar on the map. You will be brought, not to the city of Savannah, but to the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge.
To actually set to map location to Savannah, you have to already be zoomed in enough to be looking at it already, hit the “Places of interest”, and find “Savannah, Georgia” in the long list of community curated locations.
How do I fix this? Or get someone else to fix it?
You can try going into Filters → More Filters, and use the ‘Place’ search bar instead. It works slightly differently than the ‘Location’ search bar at the top of the screen. I don’t know the details but I’m guessing that the ‘Place’ search bar uses places created on iNaturalist whereas the ‘Location’ search bar uses Google.
The ‘Place’ search bar doesn’t have everything, but it should at least have all the US counties and states and such (I’m not sure how well it works in other countries). If you can’t find the specific area you want, you can try entering the county instead, then if you want a more refined search you can draw a box or circle around your area of interest.
The ‘Place’ search bar is also more reliable, in my opinion. Using the ‘Place’ search bar to find Savannah GA puts a polygon roughly around Savannah GA, as one would expect.
If I type Savannah Ge it automatically offers up the city before I even type the rest of the state name, does that help? (Same amount of letters, just not as intuitive maybe.)
This is correct
that’s not exactly right. the Explore page will try to match a result from the Location box to an iNat place, and then if it can’t find a match, it will fall back to a rectangular “custom boundary” based on a Google place. however, the matching doesn’t always work as expected, and that’s when you get these sorts of issues. i have a longer explanation here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/searching-for-observations-in-a-city-returns-observations-for-a-specific-land-feature-within-the-city/43676/23, and subsequent posts in that thread (and other threads) also provide more information.
for now, this is the correct solution for this particular issue.
I know it isn’t exactly the same, but I usually search by county, rather than the city of the same name. Of course results aren’t identical, but it is a fast and easy way to search an area. IE: Charleston, Greenville, Chesterfield (all in SC) for example.
