Observations close to the Iguazú River on the Argentine side appear in Brazil. Two examples: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/20530946 There the map details have the wrong country but the correct Argentine province: South America - Brazil - Misiones, AR https://www.inaturalist.org/observa…

I had a similar problem last year along the Namibia-Angola border. Observations that were in Namibia were assigned to Angola. Examples: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/36246689 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/36246663 I have some 50-odd observations like this. I have left them a…

Maybe we could submit this as a “feature request”, that users could obtain access to add more “points” to the polygon lines. Currently the major observation site in the Parque Nacional Iguazú (Argentina), the 3.5-km-long Sendero Macuco, is incorrectly located in Brazil.

Same issue for me in two observations made on the Brazilian side of the Parque Estadual do Turvo in Derrubadas - RS - Brazil. Their location appear to be right, but if I search my observations for anything in Argentina i get those 2 as the result. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/35773805 h…

I guess I don’t really understand how country is “assigned” to the observation, as my observations were precisely geotagged, and the exact locations are clearly on the Namibian side of the border and not the Angolan side! :man_shrugging:

iNaturalist simplifies complex borders in order to keep the site usable. If we used complex boundaries for borders at follow rivers, as in this case, it would make the site too slow to use. So here is the boundary for Nambia in the Rundu area: [image] You can see it doesn’t follow the river too p…

Thank you for this very clear explanation! Much appreciated! Honestly, it doesn’t really bother me as to which country these observations end up in. From a scientific perspective, I’d rather they have the correct GPS coordinates associated with them (especially since I went to the effort of recordi…

I know there are some algorithms out there for taking large, complex borders and pruning them down to much smaller sets of points while deviating as little as possible from the original. It might be worth experimenting with running some GADM shape-files through one or more of these algorithms a few …

Thanks Jeremy, we’ll take a look at this.

Bumping this thread in response to another report of this issue. One thing that is confusing about these two examples is that the border as shown on the map within iNat (observation page: either “Map” or “Open Street Map”) looks correct, while the assigment of country is not. If a better boundary wo…

[image] deboas: If a better boundary works for Google Maps and Open Street Map, why not here? I don’t know how Google Maps or OSM work, but I assume quite differently than iNat do, and they probably have much better infrastructure (at least I’m sure Google does). As I said above , iNat simplif…

Observations close to border in wrong country (near Iguazú Falls, Argentina vs. Brazil)

Bug Reports

Topic		Replies	Views
Argentina - iNaturalist World Tour General inat-world-tour	1	703	July 16, 2019
Standard Place: Argentina. The boundaries are wrong in some areas Bug Reports	0	459	May 18, 2019
Incorrect countries assigned along country borders General	7	342	July 31, 2025
Observation near border showing up in wrong state Bug Reports web	6	144	November 21, 2025
Observations showing up in wrong country despite map placement appearing correct Bug Reports	7	453	March 22, 2023

Observations close to border in wrong country (near Iguazú Falls, Argentina vs. Brazil)

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