When searching for obseravtions at “Mauritius” or at “Maurice”, observations from La Réunion should not be included.
Do the search with the filters. Location search might result in a square boundary box, whereas places will return you the true observations within a defined area. A recurring issue, I hope the next major relaunch of the site will address the distinction of those two in a more easy to approach way.
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Even if I search for “Mauritius” it does a search for the place rather than a square bounding box. Your search looks like it has a bounding box rather than the place.
If I search your observations from explore and enter “Mauritius” in the location this is what I get:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=8357&subview=table&user_id=jeanphilippeb
I have seen the problem @carnifex describes with other places but I can’t recreate with Mauritius currently.
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If I search for the “Location” (“Emplacement” in French) “Mauritius”, it does a search within a square, with this URL:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?nelat=-18.7763&nelng=59.58439999999996&place_id=any&subview=table&swlat=-21.637&swlng=55.766599999999926&user_id=jeanphilippeb
and this square overlaps the North-Est of La Réunion (as far as I can see from the observations that get included in the result).
If I use the more options filter popup and search for the “Place” (“Lieu” in French) “Mauritius”, it does a search for the Mauritius contry (including the Rodrigues island, which is a region of the Mauritius Republic), with this URL:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=8357&subview=table&user_id=jeanphilippeb
This is not the only problem with bound
aries. I live in Thailand, and have never been to Myanmar, but, when I search for Myanmar observations for Cercopoidea (Hemiptera), about 50 of mine come up!
Weird. That’s exactly what I did too but with a different result. Maybe the language makes a difference.
Correct. You can see the square if you click on “Boîte englobante” or “Carte” (Bounding Box or Map in English).
I get the same problem as you are getting if I search for “New Forest” (a national park in southern England). I get a bounding box which includes the surrounding towns rather than the place of the same name.
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I had a similar problem with Cape Town - and was told to skip the broken Location, and go to Filter by Place.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/searching-for-cape-town-shows-cape-town-marine/8164/10
To be clear, Location is not “broken,” it’s working as designed. Using Location, you should get a result pretty much anywhere in the world because we search Google Maps, whereas the Places search (in the filters) only searches places on iNaturalist. It’s there so at least if you search with Location you will get something. Whether or not the Explore page should work like that when it’s revised, that’s up for debate (although please not on this thread).
So this is not a bug, the site is working as designed and the iNat place for Mauritius does not include La Réunion.
Can you please provide a URL or two? We have to simplify country borders in order to make the site workable at this scale (the more complex a boundary, the more taxing it is on our infrastructure), so if your observations are right by the border, it’s likely they’re affected by this.
But could you make the square around Mauritius a bit smaller?
I undestand that it is not a software bug, but there is a data bug in the definition of the square:
Compare with the much smaller area around La Réunion, it does not include Mauritius:
I let open the question to include or not the Rodrigues island in this Mauritius square:
And I suggest to register another square for the Rodrigues island, presently it is not known as a “place”:
It is even not known as a “location” :
Google Maps knows the Rodrigues island:
I suspect that the size of the square is controlled by the zoom level that google maps gives when you search for that place on google maps and isn’t actually set by iNaturalist.
That is an iNaturalist place rather than the bounding box you’re getting for Mauritius. I still don’t understand why you get the bounding box rather than the iNaturalist place when you search for Mauritius.
It is possible to create places in iNaturalist. As far as I can see Rodrigues island doesn’t exist currently.
https://www.inaturalist.org/places
See “New Place”
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I created this place for the Rodrigues island:
https://www.inaturalist.org/places/rodrigues-mu
To select it, you need to type in “Rodrigues, MU” (neither “Rodrigues”, “Rodrigues island”, “Rodrigues, Mauritius”, “Rodrigues, Maurice” enable to get it), which is not intuitive:
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I suggest you to ask a software developper to analyze why typing in “Mauritius” or “Maurice” in the location control box gives an entry that corresponds to a bounding box, instead of this iNaturalist place:
https://www.inaturalist.org/places/mauritius
If this is not the expected behavior, as you indicated, if I understood correctly.
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A post was split to a new topic: Linking of Google locations and iNat places
I moved the question about Google locations and iNat places to its own topic.
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