I often try to restrict my searches to the Caribbean… but doing so results in this.
Some tiny sliver of the region has been misleadingly named as the Caribbean. Can this be fixed? Can we get an actual option to search for Caribbean wildlife? That’d be swell. Thanks.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?nelat=27.26341195155918&nelng=-59.41749567861399&place_id=any&swlat=9.993000051776924&swlng=-85.17150006593276&taxon_id=47532
Searched Caribbean and that’s the first option. Yours is called Caribbean Sea Costa Rica to southern Jamaica.
The ‘Caribbean’ is named as such in Google Maps, something the site has no control over.
I’d suggest voting here
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/implement-standard-marine-places-for-the-worlds-oceans/1458
yep, i voted and commented on that thread 2 years ago… and still no progress. as a user who predominantly identifies marine organisms, it is incredibly frustrating not having a viable means of focusing my searches.
3 notes:
There do seem to be a small number of records where the locations are not indexed which is why if you look in the map view, you get a few results which are in the centre of a continent, but if you look at the details info on the record, no place indexing seems in place.
Additionally records clearly on land, but with enormous accuracy buffers which cross multiple continents will be returned as they are not indexed as being in any continent.
I don’t understand, how is this “solved”? Your map is a rectangle roughly encompassing part of the Caribbean, along with parts of the Gulf of Mexico.
Why are you asking me?
because this post is listed as “solved”, with your comment being quoted.
You haven’t specified what you consider to be in the Caribbean, but you can get basically all the observations in the area by stringing together existing places. (Remove 155098 from the URL if you don’t want Bahamas/Turks & Caicos.)
I would recommend bookmarking or using a collection project to save the place_ids for later use.
yeah, I know I can make a custom search by figuring out the location codes for the relevant countries… but does that not seem a little ridiculous? why is it so difficult to search for observations in bodies of water. (i’d wager most users don’t know how to make such location-specific searches). couldn’t the coders at iNat just do this behind the scenes, such that I could simply type “Caribbean Sea” or “Mediterranean Sea” or “Eastern Pacific” and bring up the relevant results?
Is there anyone affiliated with iNat who can comment on whether any progress is being made towards a solution to this vexing problem?
You can view the feature request and staff response at https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/implement-standard-marine-places-for-the-worlds-oceans/1458/
The problem with this is that it also brings in all the terrestrial records which he clearly does not want.
However, each of the place id definitions includes inshore waters or water between islands controlled by that nation, so any attempt using the not_in_place will then exclude these records because they are indexed in that nation.
Basically there is no search combination that will return all oceanic records.
I would not interpret
to mean only oceanic records.
this does
Marine taxa won’t be found in terrestial environments, what is needed is a full map, taking land out means some records will be lost due to settings.
in a perfect world, I’d love the ability to search only aquatic and intertidal records (say, within 0.5 km of the shore). but I’d settle for a region-specific search (i.e. Caribbean Sea, encompassing all of the relevant countries). the taxa I search for normally don’t have any terrestrial members, so that naturally narrows things down.
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