How to add places for suburbs in Maroondah

I’m currently trialling out collection projects for a report. I want the observations to be across a council (Australia) to the project but I am only able to add 2/5 suburbs in the council area.
I’ve tried adding GPS coordinate, suburb name, council name to see if any options would appear on the drop down.

Is there some sort of formal request needed to add?

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The places need to exist as an iNaturalist place. See the “Add New Place” button on the places page. iNat identify will bring up places from google maps as well as iNat places which could explain why you might have seen the places somewhere on iNat (if you have).

Edit - I think these places should exist already since they should come under this I think: “We already have places for all the continents and countries, as well as two administrative levels below country.”. I think your existing counties are iNat created places rather than user created places. Maybe there is there was a problem importing some Australian council areas? iNat help (@tiwane) might be able to find out and get these places created for you.

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Welcome to the forum!
iNat gets country-level, state-level, and county-level boundaries from GADM. In this case, it seems when Ringwood and Croydon merged in 1994 to create Maroondah, GADM decided to leave them as two pieces rather than unite them. So it seems to be the case that the current Maroondah is everything encompassed by the places called Maroodah - Ringwood and Maroondah - Croydon. GADM doesn’t have places lower than county-level, which means they wouldn’t have boundaries for the suburbs.

Does your project need to have each suburb individually, or will a single place for all of Maroondah work? Did you look at iNat’s boundaries for Ringwood and Croydon to see if they cover everything you’re looking for?

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Thanks for the swift replies!

I’ll give the Add Ne Place a go, look a bit complicated.
Not exactly sure how KML works.

Yes, I would like to cover all the suburbs in Maroondah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Maroondah

Is there a way to automate importing areas that should exist?

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You said there were five suburbs, but:

“Suburbs located in the City include Ringwood, Croydon, Heathmont, Ringwood East, Ringwood North, Warranwood, Croydon North, Croydon South, Croydon Hills, Bayswater North and parts of Kilsyth South, Vermont and Park Orchards.”

At any rate, you’ll need to either draw the shapes for each one, or find a source (like open street maps or the city website) for a shapefile or kml.

Awesome!

I’ve gone through open street maps but can only download XML which doesn’t let me.
Any advice? I’ve checked the city website but couldn’t find anything.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/3333992/history#map=12/-37.8029/145.2660

Just a quick note that I moved this from #bug-reports to #general.

There are lots of ways to get data from OSM. You can do a websearch for something like “OSM download boundaries” to get some ideas, but here’s one that works for me.

In QGIS, install the plugin QuickOSM.
Run a Quick query in QuickOSM with Key = boundary, Value = administrative, and in = Maroondah.
To split the features into separate layers, do Vector->Data Management Tools->Split Vector Layer. Use either full_id or osm_id as the Unique ID field. Keep a note of where the layers save.
Bring the saved layers back into QGIS and for each one you want to use, right-click and choose Export->Save features as…
You can then use the saved kml files for your iNat place boundaries.

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