Hi folks, I wasn’t sure whether this should be under Bug Reports, Feature Requests, or here.
It looks as though country borders in iNat are simplified to make them more tractable to load on the website (see the screenshot below), but this is causing issues where some records are being assigned to the wrong country if they are close to those simplified borders.
Please see this record as an example, with the associated discussion in the comments: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/294926267. This record was uploaded via the iNat app, so the problem might be specific to the app.
It’s understandable that detailed country data are not loaded on the website/app as the size of the dataset is prohibitive. However it’s problematic to use the same generalized data to calculate the country for the record as in this case. It would be better to have the app call a service with the record coordinates to get the correct country name.
Hoping this reaches the relevant iNat team members!
The problem is that lots of the villages and settlements are in the riparian area, and thus a fair whack of data is coming in or expected from these misaligned regionis.
Would be nice to get them aligned properly. (eastern Angola - DRC is just as bad, but less data).
Are there other borders for the same area that you are looking at? For example “The Gambia” is just a rectangle, but “Gambia” (Sic) is the actual map border. However, you have to find that border in the filter tab, not using the explore location. Also, the borders of “West Africa” is a rectangle, rather than the sum of West African countries, this leads to a lot of erroneous inclusions in searches. Not sure if Africa itself can be added as a searchable location as well.
It would be nice to search by a place and be able to manually add a buffer distance to include in the search results so as to be able to include observations with large inaccuracy circles, cases where, for whatever reason, the observation is in slightly the wrong place, and instances like this where the iNat place borders are not accurate to the real border.
Would fetching the country and other admin details from a service, rather than using these generalized borders be an option? I’ve used the Geonames API for that before but it might not scale for iNat levels of use. iNat could just set up their own service with a detailed set of borders to get more accurate admin areas. I think TDWG was also looking at a standardized set of borders at some point.
In other words, send the coords to a service that can provide more accurate country, stateProvince, etc, rather than using the generalized boundaries that iNat uses for other reasons.
(Acknowledging the points made in the other posts referenced here that borders will never be perfect, but they can certaintly be a lot better in iNat).
