Still not finding any resolution to the issue illustrated in the screen capture that I have pasted above. This is Toronto and as you can see the projected City of Toronto boundary misses a significant portion of land. The same happens if I adjust the location search to “Toronto”. When I map a sighting I try to be as accurate as possible but in this case, if I map any sightings on the land on the west side of the peninsular this sighting will not be listed for anyone using this municipal boundary to explore species lists for the municipality. So, for example, I observed and mapped a Pipevine Swallowtail just 50m from the tip of the peninsular back in September. A subsequent search for all Pipevine Swallowtail records in Toronto for 2025 did not pick up that particular observation.
On the about page for any place you can flag it for issues. In this case the page for Toronto already has two flags about this (and 2 previous forum threads):
https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/545806
https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/646004
Wonky County Borders - General
The boundaries of Toronto on the map are innacurate - Bug Reports
It looks like for this particular type of imported “place”, only staff can edit them. The recommendation is to use this user-created boundary instead: https://www.inaturalist.org/places/city-of-toronto-on-ca
Ah, I just realized this is a continuation of a previous thread where the reason for lack of resolution has already been given by staff:
England’s counties and London’s boroughs (also from GDAM) are wonky, but in a different way - for the most part, they’re the right shape (if slightly low-res) - but a lot of them (not all, Cornwall mostly follows the Tamar perfectly) are transposed about half a mile east and slightly south. These borders are often natural features, or manmade boundaries. For Kingston, this means it misses the Thames and scoops up a load of natural sites it shouldn’t:
This wildly distorts the checklists. Kingston’s checklist is missing a lot of things that have been found on the river (e.g Impatiens capensis, naturalised on the Thames, but not elsewhere), but it also means it picks up a lot of things that it shouldn’t. For instance, Oenanthe pimpinelloides - very uncommon; with 311 RG observations country-wide at time of writing; just 17 of these are within the motorway/highway that encircles London - shows in Kingston’s checklist, not Surrey’s (which has the same transposition), because the border scoops up the nationally important nature reserve of Epsom Common (Surrey / Epsom & Ewell):
Mostly just an annoyance, but it does make searching for observations within the city’s limits or not very tricky. Also, since parks nature reserves within London are (mostly) the responsibility of the boroughs, it means using iNat to get species lists for boroughs (especially ones with important sites, like along the Thames) is a bit difficult!
Sounds like it’s using the wrong datum for data projection ie the imported shape is in a different projection than the one that iNaturalist is using
iNaturalist on an iPhone labels observations in Warwick, Massachusetts correctly. iNaturalist on an Android phone labels the observations in Orange, Massachusetts. Towns matter a lot in New England.These 26 k observations are mostly in Warwick, but mostly labeled as being in Orange.
Given that half of iNaturalist is GIS, I think it’s worthwhile to do it to make sure everything lines up, possibly during northern hemisphere winter when the site is least active. I’m not aware of any border changes since the last time the place definitions were imported, but I’m sure the people who live in those areas would also appreciate accurate borders.
Y’all should be happy that your mapping problems are at the municipal and borough level! You don’t know how good you have it! For most of the world outside of Europe and North America even the country borders are crap. Here’s the entire southern border of the country of Belize:
The white dashed line is the actual border and the orange line is iNaturalist’s border. And don’t even get me started on district and city boundaries. Rio de Janeiro is just a big square. In comparison, the maps of Toronto and the boroughs of London are technical masterpieces!