I’ve been thinking that we should start adding range maps for vascular plants. For example, USGS has range maps available in ESRI shapefile format based on the Atlas of United States Trees (Little, 1981). They are not 100% accurate (especially for Canadian and Mexican ranges of certain tree species)…

[image] charlie: i spend a fair bit of time looking at range maps and checking the outliers Same here. When I am investigating a particular taxon, first thing I do is go to the map tab on the Taxon page, and visit the pins that seem to be out of place. Most often it’s a mis-ID, but sometime…

Reverse populating from GBIF is an interesting idea. I’m not sure it has to be an either/or, but I would actually focus on using it to populate the checklists first before the atlases. Checklists are much more user available, and I’m not sure the site has quite figured out the use case for atlases …

[image] cmcheatle: One concern I would have is that sites like GBIF dont tend to update their records when taxonomy is updated. Yes, a taxonomic cross-walk to current iNat taxonomy would have to be part of the process, no matter how up-to-date (or not) GBIF taxonomy is. Hopefully we curate t…

[image] jdmore: Hopefully we curate the synonymy well enough at our end that most of that could be automated Works well for lumping or straight swaps, not so well for splitting.

[image] cmcheatle: Works well for lumping or straight swaps, not so well for splitting. Fair point, and maybe that’s where Atlases have their best (though still imperfect) use case – just as with internal iNat splits.

[image] saturnring: but the checklists include species not really there due to huge accuracy circles That might be another case for populating atlases directly from something like GBIF, and considering those to be the curated source for range data in iNaturalist. Any conflicts with checklist…

[image] jdmore: here I am only contemplating iNat Standard Places (and/or their checklists) My example in the cited thread was for Placer County, CA, which I think is a standard place. As an amateur just trying to contribute as I can to the identification process, I think both the maps and th…

[image] This is the potentially (definitely?) erroneous data point @saturnring used as an example, which has been imported into GBIF: pink squares.

Range maps for vascular plants

General

saturnring April 2, 2019, 6:55pm 18

but the checklists include species not really there due to huge accuracy circles: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/geoprivacy-obscuring-and-auto-obscure-discussion/457/31

Topic		Replies	Views
What to do about incorrect range maps General	15	712	September 6, 2024
Don't automatically update atlases based on observations Feature Requests	59	2693	April 17, 2020
What should represent a 'range' for a species in iNaturalist General	63	9178	July 31, 2019
Taxonomic splits with atlases: how much overlap is okay? Curators	11	1128	December 9, 2020
Updating IUCN Red List rangemaps Curators	18	1746	September 21, 2021

Range maps for vascular plants

Related topics