Searching for "Santa Rosa CA" gives wrong bounding box

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

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

image
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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: Go to explore

Step 2: Search “Santa Rosa CA” as the location

Step 3: No matter what ya do, you get a small section of the creek trail, rather than the whole town.

2 Likes
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This isn’t a bug with the website, it’s just because whoever made the location put the bounding box incorrectly. You can make your own location for this area and then have someone merge them, or wait for someone else to fix it.

2 Likes
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first, there’s a difference between what happens if you filter using the Location box vs the Filters > More Filters > Place box. (there are tons of other discussions in the forum that explain this. you can search for those if you like.) typically, i like to filter using Filters > More Filters > Place.

second, assuming you’re talking about the city of Santa Rosa in Sonoma County, CA, it doesn’t look like anyone has created a place definition for that within iNaturalist (see https://www.inaturalist.org/search?utf8=✓&q=santa+rosa&commit=Go&source[]=places), or at least i can’t find it. so you won’t be able to filter by that place until someone has created it.

so you could create a place definition (see https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/creating-a-place-for-your-us-city-using-census-bureau-geography-data/21927) and use it to filter, or you could just filter using your own bounding box. the easiest way to define a bounding box is to pan / zoom into the map so that it looks like the city is shown within the viewable area of the map. then click the “Redo search in map” button. from there, if you need to tighten the box, you can adjust the lat and lng values in the URL.

4 Likes
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I’ve noticed similar issues with a lot of locations (where searching the name of a city or town automatically selections a section of that town, or searching the name of a park or natural area goes to a specific defined section of that area.) It happens often enough that when I want to know what plants are likely to grow in a certain area, I usually just narrow it by county to avoid getting overly-specific results.

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same with Brazil/Brasil, sends you to Brasilia

1 Like