Another thought, if we really wanted to make a push to populate atlases, would be to mine the online specimen data portals of the world. Or has GBIF has already done that for us??
Most online specimen records should have at least two administrative levels in their data (Country/State-equivalent) if not a third (County-equivalent).
Could we develop a one-off batch process to match those data up to iNaturalist Atlas places, and populate atlases for taxa that don’t yet have them?
To avoid problems with misidentified specimens, maybe when a taxon has at least two independent specimen records from the same administrative unit, that unit gets added to the Atlas.
For taxa with existing atlases, a more circumspect reconciliation process might be needed.
I guess the big question for iNat staff would be whether the value of the resulting atlases would exceed the time and effort to do something like this.