Hi, I help manage a local pollinator garden and I’d like to create a new project specifically for this area but I don’t have enough observations to create a new place. If I provide the KML file can someone create the place for me so I can build a project for it?
If this is against the rules, I understand and I’ll try to make the necessary observations as quickly as possible.
Hi, welcome! here’s a bit of background as to why this restriction is in place.
If you don’t mind, please do go ahead and use iNaturalist a bit more first.
There are a few reasons we’re doing this, but first and foremost is to emphasize that iNat is about observations and identifications. Everything else is secondary, if not tertiary, and folks who want to use iNat’s other features should always understand the iNat experience from the perspective of an observer and/or an identifier. We see a lot of people signing up for iNat and trying to make a project right off the bat, which often leads to some confusion on the project creator’s part about the behavior of their participants or what all the various settings mean. I would have preferred to apply this restriction to collection and umbrella projects as well, but that seemed to get a lot of pushback . Places have similar problems, largely because of people creating place records for places that already exist.
There are also some technical reasons for doing this, particularly regarding places. Making new places that encompass lots of observations kicks off automated background jobs that can take a really, really long time, and sometimes that affects site performance for everyone. One could argue that no one should have the ability to do this, but we feel pretty strongly that new users definitely should not be able to do this.
https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/24731-new-requirements-to-sending-messages-making-projects-and-making-places
You might also consider whether a traditional project – where you don’t use a kml file to define a place, but just have people manually add their observations to your project – would be better. If your pollinator garden isn’t huge, you’re going to have the problem of observations with accuracy circles that stick out past the borders of your place won’t get included. So, for example, if someone photographs a bee 2 m from the outer edge of your garden, and their phone says the GPS is accurate to within a 10 m circle around the point, some areas within that circle aren’t in your defined garden, and so that observation won’t be added to your project. In addition, collection projects (that automatically add observations, like projects that pull all observations from a kml-file based place) won’t let you also manually add observations, so you won’t be able to add that observation – the only way to include it would be to have the observer go in and edit their observation accuracy to make the range fall within the borders of your place.
No problem. Thanks for the reply!
Thanks for the suggestion. I think I’ll be ok with my boundaries because the area I want to use is a city block, so the edges will be streets and without any observations. Let me know if you still think a traditional project is the way to go.
You’ll probably get most of the pertinent observations using a collection project and defined place. There will be the occasional person who makes observations with large accuracy circles and so you’ll miss a few, but that’s a typical tradeoff for using a collection project to gather observations for you.
if using the web interface you can create a “pin” for the place and always select it when uploading observations for that place. the pin is essentially an accuracy circle that can be expanded close to the boundary defined by the .kml without going over. On the other hand, if you want to show the exact location of the observation within the place, you’d want very small circles and wouldn’t want to use the pin.
My experience has been that GPS location can be quite off on occasion, so any place that small could still have perhaps 0.1% of observations where a photo happened to have the recorded location be outside the borders. Certainly there’s not enough accuracy for the width of a street to be reliable. And if the project is set to automatically add all photos in the geo boundary–what about if someone happens to take a photo of a weed growing out of the sidewalk, a bug crawling across the pavement, etc and uploads it to iNaturalist?
Maybe not to say the obvious, but what if you made more observations? 50 is not that many and could be accumulated over a few days. I doubt that the urgency of this place does not allow for any time to make some observations first.
