I would like to have an app that would be limited to a certain area (such as a park that has multiple trails) that functions just like the current ios app. Along with that I’d like to have a map that shows all the trails in the park. Could this be done with the iNaturalist app?
I’m not a dev, but the only easy way I can think for the trails and such to be included would be if there was an option to switch the type of map display… perhaps between Google Maps and Open Street Maps.
Regarding the rest, iNat is really about with wildlife and community aspect and is meant to be global in scale, so limiting it specifically to a small area is sort of counter to its goals.
You can set up a local project and view just that on the app though, which would have the same effect in terms of limiting observations to your specific region of choice. In fact, if it’s a park it’s likely that there is already a project for it.
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i don’t think there’s anything within the iNaturalist platform that would allow you to configure a page that includes trail maps, if the standard Google Maps don’t already have the trails on them.
that said, you probably have at least a couple of options to build your own thing:
- if you want to build you own iOS app, you could probably do a fork of the iNaturalist IOS app: https://github.com/inaturalist/INaturalistIOS
- if you just want a custom map, they’re relatively easy to build using the iNaturalist API: https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/docs/. here’s an example (just a web page and not a full-fledged app) where start with a map for a local park and pull in iNaturalist observations in that park from that last 30 days using the iNat API: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/hanc_map_inat.html. (it probably wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to add something to show current location on the map, or to drop it into an iOS app.)
sometimes the hardest thing to get is a proper trail map. if it doesn’t already exist in some form, you’d probably have to create it, either by taking trails from, say, Open Street Maps (if they exist), or you’d have draw one out yourself. if the place is big enough and the trails are complex enough, you might also want to chop your trails map up into tiles at different zoom levels and host them somewhere. (i did not chop up the trail map in my example above, and you can see the text isn’t readable at lower zoom levels because it’s so small, but generally, you would only use that particular example in a narrow range of zoom levels because the place is not huge.)
UPDATE: in the example in #2 above, i added a thing to get and display your current location and also made the map a little more mobile friendly. (some of the iNat pins are still a little hard to click on a mobile device if you have fat fingers – related to the way the way the clickability is implemented in in iNat – but they are clickable at the pointy base of the pins. i use the tip of my pinky finger, and that seems to work better than my index finger.)
Creating a project for park is a good idea, trails usually are seen from satelite photos, anyway observation pins will surround them quickly.
If you use satellite view, you can see the trails when you zoom in. I use that to locate ‘where I saw that plant’ since I don’t use GPS
On the android app, you can get a regional plant list by going to explore, zooming in on the area of interest, then selecting plants in filter, and species for view. Its not quite as good as a specific outline of a park, but its a pretty close approximation.
In this examples, I zoomed into Greenbelt park in Greenbelt MD, select plants, and then look at the species list.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/FcTHw8sseBDQHcdV7 Greenbelt park
https://photos.app.goo.gl/pg8vhPmuRz94wKKg6 Select plants (top of the page)
https://photos.app.goo.gl/j7WkkDxseBnbU6ph9 List of plants by most frequently observed in the region
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