I had a hard time finding help with projects. I set up several years ago but now things have changed. I want a traditional project in a limited geographic area, a land trust property. I started to set it up, “Sanford Community Forest” which is in Sanford Maine. But it set it up as observational not traditional. I do not see how to change this and I want to limit it to just the confines of the land trust but I do not see how to do that. I see it says something like you need 50 species, which I have already. Any help or direction for help would be great.
Under “Start a Project”, the option for a traditional project is on the very last line of the page and not very obvious (" Use this link to create a traditional project instead.")
Also, is Sanford Community Forest in the iNat system as a defined place? If you wanted to have collections automatically added to the project (so, the collection project route), you might have to define a new place in iNat (using a kml file, I think).
Setting up projects is easy once you get the process down, but I know it can be confusing at first. To set up a project for your Sanford Community Forest, you first need to have it defined as a “place” in iNaturalist. I looked in Places for something named Sanford and it’s not there, so you’ll need to create it. There’s a bare-bones description for how to do this at https://www.inaturalist.org/places/new
but it mostly sends you to Google Maps to make a kml file, and that might be daunting. If you don’t know how to do this and can’t find someone who can, I or someone can make the file if we have a picture of the property boundaries.
It does sound though as if you probably want a project which would automatically collect any observation within those boundaries: That’s exactly what a Collection project is designed to do.
If you write back about your project, it will help if you give the address of the project so we can look at it for suggestions.
Good luck!
I talked with one of the land stewards and she has a kml file she is going to send me. So I will try and set it up but may be asking for help if there is a problem.
What is the difference between a traditional and Collection project?
Sorry I forgot to answer your question. This is a new piece of property acquired by a land trust. I am helping them to get some data on what plants and animals are on the property. They will want to download the information into data sheets for the flora and fauna.
It is located on Oak Street, Sanford, Maine
I have set up projects before but it has been a long time and there was only one type of project.
In a traditional project, you and maybe other users manually add any observations you want to include. In a collection project, you can set several criteria (like from place X and belonging to taxon Y) and then any observations that fit are automatically added (and you can’t manually add anything).