How to add observations to a place?

I have been trying to create a distinct place in iNaturalist for a biological survey of a local park. I created a KML file, loaded it into iNaturalist, and I had thought that iNaturalist would collect a survey of all of the observations that occur within the polygon formed by that KML file and return them as a summary. However, I noticed that after I created the project and the polygon defining the locality was successfully defined, no observations appeared in the “observations” tab. I tried looking up instructions for how to use the “Places” function, but couldn’t find any indication as to how to get a list of observations for that location. I see there is a “life list” function, but it seems to only define taxa a priori and every species must be entered manually, rather than including reports of observations that are new to a particular area.

Does anyone know how to get observations to appear for a certain place once the KML polygon for that place has been defined?

If you make a collection project for the place (as opposed to a traditional project), starting at https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/new , the observations should appear automatically. If you have already made a collection project, could you provide a link to it?

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@russell_engelman maybe you could clarify what exactly you created and post the links of what you did.

As far as I understand you only created a new place with he KML you made. Maybe you could provide the link/name of that place so we can take a look.

@sgene I’m not 100% that @russell_engelman means a iNaturalist project when using the term “project”.

@russell_engelman you could use your newly create place to create a collection project or simply do a search on it to get a list of all observations and species in that area.

“Places” also have the possibility to enable “Check lists allowed?” which automatically create a checklist for that place.

“List” might not be the right thing for what you want to do.

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So this is strange, when I checked the page today there was an observation there that was not there before (https://www.inaturalist.org/places/frohring-meadows).

But now when I try “View Observations” the observations all appear, despite not appearing when I tried this before (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=172382).

The updating of the list is not an immediate process. It takes time to review which of the 70+ million records are in the place.

That process runs in the background of the database queued up with other tasks.

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