I found it very simple actually using my “hack” method - it was just a matter of being willing to spend time fiddling with the polygon (visually, on the map) until you added enough points to follow whatever contours you need to follow. I used My Maps in google maps. My trick was to start by importing a polygon (in fact, it was a set of squares from the breeding bird atlas, which we also use for our butterfly atlas). You then just move your starting polygon over the spot where you want it, then start moving the corners into position. Each time you click on the midpoint of one of the sides, it creates a new “corner” that you can drag into position. I never encountered a limit to the number of points I could add to a polygon - just my patience. I just kept adding new starter polygons using the import function. I then exported the results as a KML file, which by luck, turned out to be compatible with our georeferencing code. I created over 300 polygons and we’ve been using them for a couple of years now. The nice thing about it is that I can refine those polygons at any time. I just open the map in My Maps, play around with the boundaries (or add additional polygons), and then export the KML file. I believe there’s some work at the other end to convert the KML into a shape file (that’s done by my associate), so I only update the polygons when I need to.
Well technically, we already have this functionality, but it’s after the fact. We’d have to do this anyways, because not all of our data comes to us via iNat. Even if we put all these polygons into iNat, we’d still have to run our georeferencing code on all the non-iNat observations.
Yup, that’s my plan. As I said earlier, I took the master list of iNat places that someone linked to, and we’ve already winnowed it down to just the Ontario places. Now I just have to go through that list and pick out the ones that look useful. But that’s going to take some time, since I’ll have to verify the boundaries of each candidate. Right now, I’m working on processing the 2025 iNat observations. My code will include 3 different location options in the output - the original place_guess provided by iNat, a re-formatted version of the place_guess, and then a alternative location generated from the response I get from the google maps API. I’ll then review the results and see how well each strategy performed, and refine the code as needed. I’m hoping I won’t have to do much in the way of “manual georeferencing”.