occasionally the pins are a little deceptive, i think, because one pin can actually represent many observations, and there’s no way to tell how many observations they represent. the color and style (pin vs dot) of the marker also give an accurate picture of only one of those observations when multiple observations are aggregated into one marker. the new density squares don’t handle the obscured dot vs unobscured pin problem, but they do seem to address multiple iconic taxa by going gray, and their opacity level also gives a little bit of an indication of multiple observations.
i wish there was a way to choose pin / dot vs density square (circle) vs heatmap on these maps, rather than just defaulting to density square (circle) at low zoom levels and pins / dots at high zoom levels. it’s possible to build your own custom map using the API, i suppose, but i doubt that many people are comfortable with that.
i think the issue is just that for the same height and width, circles are smaller than squares and don’t provide full coverage of the space. i think the existing circles actually are very similar in concept to these squares, except they are oversized (at maybe 16px x 16px to represent a 4px x 4px square – didn’t measure exactly) and therefore overlap each other quite a bit. these new squares appear to be 8px x 8px and represent a 8px x 8px space, and i suppose you could style the circles to be 8px x 8px, representative of a 8px x 8px space, as well to solve the overlap problem. but i bet some people might be confused about a circle’s lack of full coverage of the space, whereas there is no question with a square.
i personally like circles a little bit more (or smaller squares) because i can see bits of the basemap even when the circles / squares are full opaque, but i understand why they chose to use a full-coverage square.