administrative boundaries for continents, countries (or equivalent), states (or equivalent) and counties (or equivalent) are represented as “standard” places in iNaturalist. the best way to search for these in the Explore web page is to use Filters > More Filters > Places rather than the Location box. (personally, i use More Filters > Places almost exclusively as my method of filtering for places, falling back to filtering by rectangles / map view or circles, as needed.)
the former gets only from the set of iNat places whereas the latter attempts to do all the complex and potentially problematic stuff i described above.
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(just a note to moderators) there’s at least one other open thread that appears to be related to this thread and might be worth merging:
(just for reference) these open threads are more distantly related (and probably should remain separate). for folks who want to understand other general issues a little more, these may be worth reading:
- https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/problem-with-the-explore-part-in-the-application/30430
- https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/incorrect-county-boundary-for-jefferson-davis-ms/26825
- https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/boundaries-of-the-northwest-territories/40001
- https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/search-engine-with-problems-with-word-brazil/28136