New Rectangle and Circle Drawing Tools for Web Explore Page

[tiwane]

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone, we appreciate it. And if anyone has some coding skills and some time, take a look at our GitHub page to see if there’s anythnig you can help out with.

@Arman

Would it be possible to allow multiple rectangles/circles to be utilized at once to vaguely mimic a polygon if full polygons won’t work?

My understanding is that at this point that’s not possible. This basically just provides an easy way to make a circle or rectangle and use existing search parameters that were already there.

@xris

I know such a feature used to be avalable for creating custom Places that didn’t already exist in iNaturalist. I used this to create boundaries for several community gardens in Brooklyn, NYC.

At some point that feature was removed.

Yes, that happened in July of 2021.

FWIW, if you want to export observation data from an arbitrary polygon, you can use GBIF, they have a tool for that.

@bobmcd

Rather than creating a place for a project, is it or could it be possible to use the rectangle and circle drawing tools coordinates to be the search parameter in a project?

Not now, but it would be great to eventually allow user-drawn polygons to be used for projects and not require them to to be actual iNat places. That would likely reduce the burden that place creation causes by quite a bit.