Implement Standard Marine Places for the world's oceans

Feature Requests
22

I’ve added more EEZs for network member countries but adding large and/or observose places continues to be an infrastructure burden.

1 Like
23

It would be helpful to be able to identify marine fish related to each ocean. There was a recent post which discussed the number of “needs id” for observations in iNat. For areas where there is an easy way to find all marine fishes, the “needs ID” is much smaller - I think people are easily able to pull up fish in the area and identify them.

Also, REEF.org has marine regions organized by the fish that are found there. Maybe something like this is a start? They also have smaller areas within each region that have similar fish. https://www.reef.org/db/zonecodes/

24

I’m adding my voice in agreement to this. The bias towards terrestrial regions makes efficient ID’ing difficult for marine biologists using iNaturalist. I think a good start would be just listing the major world oceans as regions (including a few miles inshore as a lot of obs are not perfectly accurate location-wise). That would be very helpful to marine biologists. I basically create my own regions through place-by-place filtering, but many places offshore don’t have a region to filter out. As joe_fish indicated, I can’t just draw a rectangle around the Caribbean for example and exclude the Pacific Ocean from Central American obs, so I have to do it place-by-place and just accept that some Pacific obs slip though because they aren’t assigned to any region. And that’s true for any oceanic search. I can already filter by continent. It’s only logical to be able to filter by ocean.

5 Likes
25

I see that the Sargasso Sea is missing – that oval near where it should be is actually Bermuda’s EEZ.

26

I am very gratefull to the staff members as carrieseltzer, who added some EEZ. I hope that small contries located in Oceania, will have their EEZ recognized soon too. I agree that species are not political entities, but the laws and the marine protected areas are. Knowing what species live in a EEZ is important for their conservation.

2 Likes
27

This would be cool, then we could atlas sea-dwelling creatures that share names with mushrooms there. It is really annoying not being able to upload my Cortinarius and Lactarius to their proper genera, not so much of a problem with Cortinarius once I learn the new genera they have implemented this year. I don’t think iNat keeps any altitude measurements, it would be easy to set the altitude of observations below sea level. More of a sidebar conversation, but I don’t think it warrants it’s own post.

1 Like
28

Actually I can’t figure out what genus Cortinarius is getting confused with, somehow a search for it matches the species epithet corticarius though, and vice versa.