The boundary for Myanmar appears to be wrong. I, apparently, have 2,000+ observations from that country, but I have never been there. ALL my observations have been from Thailand.
All I come across for Myanmar is a boundary box, which is very inaccurate.
By design all the borders are pretty “choppy” due to the impact on site performance it would have with highly accurate borders. Can you share a URL or screenshot where ~2000 of your observations are falling within Myanmar? I’m only able to find one (near the border on iNat):
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=6992&user_id=lesday
Note that the search for Myanmar is done under Filters>More Filters>“Place”, not “Location”, which uses Google Maps instead of just searching iNat Places.
A bit off topic, but do you know why the Location search is even there?
Because iNat is not a geodatabase and stores a tiny percentage of the locations that are available through GoogleMaps in its internal database.
Having just checked it, it looks like using Location simply adds a rectangular bounding box that fully contains the GoogleMaps location.
iNat is not a geodatabase
I get this, but “location” is a confusing choice of phrasing here. Oh well–that’d be a feature request. Thank you!
(Just a note – the rectangular bounding box effect I described above is sporadic. That’s the difference between the “Place” Myanmar and the “Location” Myanmar, while for example the Place and Location for Egypt are identical.)
The Explore page is due for a redesign. Since this is one of the most common questions that comes up, making the “iNat place search” more prominent is probably near the top of the list. :) See https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ideas-for-a-revamped-explore-observations-search-page/8439
As ‘Explore’ is due to be redesiged. I will drop this bug report of mine. I am sure that things will be sorted out.
