Project is showing observations outside of the boundary

Bug Reports
1

Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Chrome

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?captive=any&place_id=any&project_id=66717&subview=map&verifiable=any

Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):

Screen Shot 2021-04-09 at 5.53.52 PM
Screen Shot 2021-04-09 at 5.53.52 PM1602Ă—1002 249 KB
Screen Shot 2021-04-09 at 5.54.52 PM
Screen Shot 2021-04-09 at 5.54.52 PM2000Ă—1200 392 KB

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):

Step 1: We established a traditional project called “SuperProject 4” to collect observations within a particular place, the “SuperProject 4 Boundary”. The project was by invitation only, and had members begin adding observations, but the project is collecting observations by those members that are outside of the boundary.

Step 2: The “SuperProject 4 Boundary” seems to work (imperfectly) as a filter, but also says “UNKNOWN”

Step 3: When we use the filter, some qualifying observations are not included in the project.

2

Traditional projects allow you to associate a project with a place separate from requiring observations to come from that place. If you want to require observations to come from that place, you need to add the place as an Observation Rule.

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By the way, if you’re just trying to get all the observations from specific observers within the SP4 boundary, a Collection Project is probably a simpler way to do it. If you think you might be interested in that, you can preview what your project would look like as a Collection Project from the Edit Project screen.

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1 Like
3

Thank you for the advice. I tried the change to observation rules that you suggested, but it still looks like the project has observations that are out of bounds. I am wondering if that “unknown” is part of my problem.

4

The Observation Rule isn’t “backwards compatible” – it won’t kick out observations already in the project. To manually remove them, you can Find Unsuitable Observations.

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The “unknown” here is just the place type, it isn’t related to the issue.

1 Like
5

Ah, got it. Thank you so much for your help!

1 Like