Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: All
URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant: NA
Description of need:
Describe the iNaturalist community need that your requested feature addresses. Include screenshots, URLs, and other details to help us all understand the issue.
Observations with extremely large uncertainty circles can have centers that are hundreds of miles outside the normal range of the species. While these don’t show up on the maps in the explore page, they do show up on the maps in the observation and identify pages. I think there are some instances where I’ve seen these be included when suggesting whether something is “nearby” or not when suggesting species. This is at least a nuisance and at most (if the latter is true) problematic in some cases. For example, an observation I came across today had an uncertainty of 2412.57km and included nearly all the continental US, all of Mexico, and half of Central America. The closest known location of the species was over 400 miles away from the observation’s center, which was prominently displayed when looking at the map on other observation pages. Locality isn’t technically inaccurate because of the uncertainty, but it’s essentially erroneous. It was correctly IDed and would easily become “research grade” if I decide to add my ID.
Feature request details:
In detail, describe the feature you are requesting. This includes its functionality, where the feature is implemented, and what it might look like. Screenshots or mock-ups are helpful. The idea is to have a concrete and actionable request which the community can discuss and vote on. It might change through discussion, but it’s much easier to iterate and talk about something specific.
In my opinion, observations with extremely large uncertainty circles (e.g., 1000 km or more) are not much more informative than observations where the location isn’t specified at all. As such, I suggest that all observations with uncertainty circles greater than or equal to 1000 km be automatically made casual. For context, a 1000 km covers nearly half the continental US. I imagine a lower limit may be ideal (maybe more like 500 km? maybe less?), but hopefully 1000 km isn’t that controversial. Regardless, I’m open to discuss at what point the observation uncertainty becomes unhelpful.