Place name not matching place marker

[jhbratton]

Why are so many people in Britain and Ireland giving a place name that doesn’t match the place marker? I keep politely pointing out that if the two don’t corroborate, the record is not valid. As far as I know, no one has yet corrected a sighting.

[bouteloua]

Without more details I’m not 100% sure what you’re referring to, but the “place name”, aka “locality notes” section is just automatically generated for most people’s observations based on a search or reverse geocoding process from their GPS coordinates (though some people do manually edit it). Are you referring to the area that, in this example, says “Putnam County, IL, USA”?

This might address what you’re seeing:

@kueda

The description you see under the map on the observation detail pages can get set by a variety of means, i.e. it is not meant to be consistent or under the system’s control. In fact, the observer can edit it to be whatever they want. We generally refer to this text as the “Locality Notes” or the place_guess (that’s it’s name in the database). Here are the ways it gets set automatically based on the software we have written:

1. On the website, using the Uploader, searching for a place by name or clicking the map will populate the Locality Notes using Google Places Autocomplete API (search) or the Google Geocoding API (click) (the user can also change them manually at this point)
2. If you submit an observation and the Locality Notes are blank, we will attempt to fill them out using the coordinates, precision, and iNat places that contain those coordinates.
3. The Android app works similarly to the website and uses basically the same Google-based methods of turning coordinates and searches into place names
4. The iPhone app does something similar except it uses the Apple equivalent of Google’s geocoding APIs.
5. Seek works similarly to the other mobile apps, depending on what operating system it’s running on

That’s a very long way of saying that if you don’t like the Locality Notes you’re seeing, it’s probably because Google or Apple didn’t do a great job of turning coordinates into a place name. We have tried to work around those errors by ignoring address-level information from Google and Apple. There’s also a chance that people are manually editing the Locality Notes, or that we have some places in the iNat database with inaccurate boundaries, but given that there are a bunch of different observations with “Kiawah Island Club” in the Locality Notes and there is not iNat place with that name, I’m pretty sure you can blame Google or Apple for this one, so I suggest you let them know about this inaccuracy in their geocoding services.

[optilete]

@jhbratton

Why are so many people in Britain and Ireland giving a place name that doesn’t match the place marker?

How do you determine it is not correct, can you give an example?

[jhbratton]

Thanks for your comments. I hadn’t given examples because I didn’t want to focus on particular people, but as you ask:
www.inaturalist.org/observations/37965732
www.inaturalist.org/observations/26669196
www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?place_id=6886

Then this is a slightly different issue, where the given place name is so vague it doesn’t verify the place marker.
www.inaturalist.org/observations/38072090

I appreciate that if you are recording in sparsely populated areas, the nearest named settlement may be many miles away, but that isn’t the case in the UK.

[jhbratton]

This discussion seems to have stalled. However, I have learned that I can tick the No box for Location is accurate. So is it legitimate for me to do so when I find records with a wide discrepancy between the place marker and stated location? And is there anything to stop the recorder just re-ticking the Yes box?

[jdmore]

Hi @jhbratton, as was mentioned in earlier responses, the “where were you” / “locality notes” box is editable text, gets populated both automatically and/or manually over the life of an observation record, and can become mismatched with the map location for various reasons. For example, after initial auto-population of the place description based on uploaded coordinates, if the observer later corrects their map coordinates, the system does not automatically re-populate the description, and the observer may forget to edit it manually.

The “Location is Accurate” assessment is meant to refer to the actual mapped coordinates (and any associated “accuracy” circle around those coordinates), not to the narrative place description.

If there is a discrepancy between the map and the narrative place description, and the mapped coordinates seem suspect but the narrative place seems right, then it is worth commenting or messaging the observer to verify the location accuracy. Just ticking no for “Location is Accurate” based on a mismatch, without inquiring first, (1) may not be true, (2) does not notify the observer of the issue, and (3) will not notify you if/when the location gets revised.