Unlike GADM, Natural Earth lumps Tokelau (TKL) into New Zealand. As for the Level 1 and Level 2 places, do the GADM boundaries for these look ok?
I think NZ considers Tokelau to be self governing and not an administrative part of NZ. But the Kermadec Islands should be included (but are not part of any NZ district). From the map scale it’s a bit hard to determine if boundaries are correct, but the names look about right. Not sure how/why iNat wants to use these divisions though. They don’t really have any connection with biological distribution, geography, or common names even. The Level 1 divisions are relevant to the regional councils who look after environment and resource management, so are relevant to pest management etc.
So you’re saying that the Level 1 units are useful but the Level 2 units aren’t?
The Kermadec Islands are there, they’re just so small they’re difficult to see. GADM calls the Level 1 unit that includes them the ‘Northern Islands’
Oh man, not surprisingly, this is going to get into a lot of sticky politics at some point. I know Google Maps gets dragged into all kind of conflict when countries don’t agree on where a boundary is. On a similar note, I don’t know if any indigenous groups are using iNat or encouraging people to do so, but if that’s the case doing one of these for those areas (even if not properly recognized as ‘countries’ would be really neat.
Important to note that GADM an Natural Earth Level 0 units or ‘countries’ aren’t meant to be sovereign nations otherwise Greenland would be part of Denmark
Are the level 2 places in GADM in the Auckland region correct? https://gadm.org/maps/NZL/auckland_2.html
Within the Auckland region, we appear to be missing Waitakere in iNaturalist as a standard place.
I came across this while looking for the appropriate standard place “parent” for this Kaipatiki Creek place referenced in this other thread.
Those are sub-divisions of level 2, at level 2 the whole lot are just “Auckland” https://country-stats.herokuapp.com/gadm2s/nzl. I don’t know where that sub-division page got its info from but it labels Great Barrier Island as “Auckland” which seems a bit bizarre to me. I would have thought just “Auckland” (either the level 1 or level 2 area of that name) would be an appropriate parent place.
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