New location fails to encompass all observations within its area

[returntoszender]

Platform: desktop web

App version number, if a mobile app issue: N/A

Browser, if a website issue: Google Chrome

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:

https://www.inaturalist.ca/observations?taxon_id=220379&user_id=returntoszender&verifiable=any

https://www.inaturalist.ca/observations?project_id=ubc-moths&taxon_id=220379&verifiable=any

https://www.inaturalist.ca/observations?place_id=236721&subview=map&taxon_id=220379&user_id=returntoszender&verifiable=any

https://www.inaturalist.ca/places/university-endowment-lands

https://www.inaturalist.ca/places/electoral-area-a

Screenshots of what you are seeing:

Actual map of all of my own Gesneria centuriella observations within the specified place (no location filtering):

Map of G. centuriella observations (by any user) within the location-filtered project “UBC Moths”:

Map of all of my own G. centuriella observations with location filtering turned on (same place as the project above):

Map of the University Endowment Lands place on iNat, with the polygon drawn by me on Google Maps based on official boundaries:

Description of problem: Having created the University Endowment Lands place a week ago (it was missing from iNat beforehand but is a distinct unincorporated place with official boundaries that I did my best to replicate), many of my observations from there are still not showing up. This is something I first noticed while looking through the species list for a project I made based on this same geographical place, where a species I know I’ve personally seen and uploaded multiple times is only showing up once.

Here’s a list of my observations of the species Gesneria centuriella, four of which were at the University of British Columbia and thus within the polygon I drew on Google Maps to create the University Endowment Lands (UEL) place. Compare my “UBC Moths” project, using the UEL as a location, which only shows one observation of that species by anyone. If I go back to my profile, search “University Endowment Lands”, and select the place I created from the “Places of Interest” list, the problem persists, showing just one Gesneria centuriella observation instead of four (note: I realize my profile shows six rather than four observations altogether in one of the above screenshots, but this is just due to the lack of location filtering – only four are in the geographical area of interest). This suggests a glitch with the place itself rather than with the project I was looking at.

The issue is not exclusive to this taxon; I tried with Noctua pronuba as well (with similar results), but opted to use a more straightforward example here since N. pronuba is one of the most commonly-observed species in my region and would have required more advanced filtering in the URL to demonstrate the problem.

I understand new places can take a few days to populate with observations. However, I created this place a little over a week ago and am seeing observations by other users, from the same timeframe as my missing observations, show up with the location filter just fine. So it does not seem to be a matter of old observations not getting added yet.

Potentially relevant is the fact that places on iNat can have a “parent”, and in this case that parent is Electoral Area A, BC, Canada. However, there are no major boundary discrepancies that I can see between the UEL as part of Electoral Area A, and the actual boundaries of the UEL as a location unto itself.

Overall, it’s admittedly a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things, but it makes it hard for me to both see all my observations from a place I used to frequent, and see accurate iNat species counts (all users) from the same place in a project I created.

[thebeachcomber]

there is no bug here; the 3 records of that species that don’t appear in the place all have very high coordinate uncertainty values that easily exceed the bounding box of your place. See https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000169942-why-is-my-observation-not-showing-up-in-a-place-or-collection-project-i-know-i-observed-it-there-

[earthknight]

Yep, exactly what I was going to check.

This comes up as a ‘problem’ often enough that it would probably be a good idea to have a pop-up warning explaining this whenever anyone makes a new place.

[optilete]

This answer saves me time…

[returntoszender]

Oh, that was simpler than I expected (I always assumed the centre of the circle was counted for location purposes, since that’s how the pin is placed on the map, not the entire breadth of it). Thanks!

I made a big uncertainty value because I was batch-editing observations after I no longer felt the location to be sensitive (I had been a student living in residence at the time), but I can probably narrow the location further for quite a few of these. As for the place itself, there is a part along the coast that I’ve been meaning to edit anyways because I mistakenly excluded it originally (there are some bits of land there that are sometimes submerged and are completely invisible on the non-satellite view), so that might fix some of these cases already (but probably not all or most of them).

It’s unfortunate for future observations, though – anyone who knows they observed something on UBC campus, but don’t remember where exactly, would need to make a pretty large uncertainty circle and potentially exclude their observation from relevant projects. Might be worth a feature request to have ellipse or rectangle uncertainty boxes.