Hello!
Our city is suffering from a massive wave of Public gardens’ “development”. They’ve completely ruined historical and public gardens by basically turning them into commercial spaces and lawns. Some of them have become so over manicured and restricted in the number of species that there is NO way that the biodiversity is not less. Our organisation wants to run a project where we map out and blitz all of the ones we have so that we can demonstrate change in diversity.
I’m facing multiple challenges:
- These are not “places” on iNaturalist and there doesn’t seem to be a way to add them to a project (traditional or otherwise) unless they are a place on iNat.
- We would have to create new “places” for each garden and some of them are pretty small and I don’t know what the etiquette is for creating teenie tiny places. (I know iNat encourages that places are not created for large boundaries)
- They have complex boundaries so the custom boundary approach (circle or square) doesn’t seem to work (and also won’t be helpful when it comes to analytics)
- I am worried I miss a couple of public gardens when i first create the KML file - would i be able to update the place later?
- I don’t know if i should maybe create multiple projects and make public gardens of our city an Umbrella project instead so that we can segment by municipality
- I don’t know if i’m overthinking this because i can just create a new project / adjust the parameters when i need to.
Hopefully this is general enough to help others and specific enough for you all to share tips :)
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If you make a traditional project for each garden - then you, or the other members, will have to add each obs.
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Creating small places will not be a problem on iNat per se (though I think users may be limited to 3 places per day?) but there are problems with adding observations to small places (see other forum threads). The places should be created individually, not as a collective. Uploading kmls will be best. Complex boundaries for small places aren’t an issue per se, except as it comes to observations indexing as within the places (as above). You can edit places and projects after creation if you are the owner/admin.
iNat’s Help has good documentation for place creation: https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000175019-how-to-make-a-place-on-inaturalist
As noted, a traditional project for each garden might be your best bet with manual addition of observations with an Umbrella project to collect them all. You could also use an observation field with the ID of the park/garden added and then make a project with observations that use that observation field.
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Depending on the range of sizes of the various parks/gardens, it might be best to make Places and Projects for each Place for the large ones, make traditional projects to manually add observations for the small ones, and then make one umbrella project that puts them all together in one place. That way you don’t have to deal with manually adding thousands of observations from a big park, but you avoid the problems with getting observations to register in a tiny Place.
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We have thought along the same lines as @daymaorg as far as using projects to track these kinds of changes - here’s what we have so far: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/desert-parks
Definitely agree that individual parks should be added separately. We haven’t created individual projects for each park, or grouped parks by municipality for including in a big umbrella project yet, but it is something we’ve considered.
As far as the small sized parks, we created the places using publicly available parcel data and added a 100 meter buffer to each before adding to iNat. This does take some effort in the GIS program of your choice, and then several days of adding to iNaturalist because of the 3/day limit. If multiple team members are eligible to add places, each person can add 3/day so it goes relatively quickly.
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Just please remember to mark cultivated plants as such 
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Wow! This is incredible!
I guess tedious and slow does it! 
Thank you so much for the response! So grateful and so impressed!
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