I’m still unclear on how places work, e.g. if I search for a town, should I also see all the observations of places within that town?
So there seem to be two Hayward towns in CA. One is in Mariposa County and shows up as Hayward, CA, US. The other, the one I’m interested in, is Hayward in Alameda County and shows up as Hayward, US, CA, which has a Species tab but no observations. Can this be fixed? If it should show observations in places within the town, can that also be fixed? Does it need a boundary?
https://www.inaturalist.org/places/hayward
I assume this is the one you are referencing ?
https://www.inaturalist.org/places/hayward-ca-us
It shows no species because it is one of thousands of ‘single point places’ that have been created in the database, meaning it has been defined incorrectly as a single GPS coordinates, in this case it appears to be on Hayward Rd east of Highway? 132.
Thus a record has to be at that exact GPS location to be determined to be in this place. It can be fixed by adding a proper map boundary to the location, which can be done by either finding a kml file that shows the borders, or hand updating the map.
That’s the one that shows up first if I look for Hayward–I don’t know anything about that aside from the fact that it has the same name.
But it’s the other Hayward in Alameda County, the one that I linked, that should have observations. There is a boundary on Google maps that looks more or less correct in comparison to the City of Hayward’s maps (they don’t have a map that is just a simple boundary), except that the City’s includes part of the bay also.
Is this something I should try to do, find/make a boundary for a city? Or ?
The other thing is that Hayward, Alameda County has the parent? in reverse of how (I think) it’s supposed to be, showing US above Hayward and CA above that.
That has the exact same problem, it is defined as a single point place as well. It does not matter if there is a border defined in Google Maps, Google Maps is only used as a visual overlay, not for any data management. What matters is what if any border is in the iNat database, which again here is nothing other than a single GPS point.
There are some species on the first tab because someone has manually added them to the checklist, but of course unless those records are at the exact GPS point the location has been defined as having.
The hierarchy parent relationship can be changed, but it is kind of pointless unless the boundary issue can be fixed.