Small custom circle boundaries in the Explore map display observations that are far outside the circle

Platform: Desktop (only tested on Windows, but can replicate on 2 machines)

Browser, if a website issue: Can replicate in Edge 138 and Firefox 140.

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:
Some of my observations, with a ~5km radius circle (1270 observations at time of posting), the centre blank: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?lat=51.30376895574157&lng=-0.18203753804374667&radius=5.648424553017703&subview=map&user_id=jamie-aa&verifiable=any
A circle with the same central point, radius about ~1.25km, showing 12934 observations (should show 0): https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?lat=51.30376895574157&lng=-0.18203753804374667&radius=0.6307093643525782&subview=map&user_id=jamie-aa&verifiable=any

Screenshots of what you are seeing:

Big circle (note the area around Chipstead has no observations at all). I haven’t counted exactly, but that number seems right:

As soon as the circle is shrunk to the observation-empty area around Chipstead, it gains ~11,000 observations, instead of showing 0:

For another example, I have no observations (or obscured observations that could show there) on the Greenwich Peninsula in London:

But putting a circle that covers it shows observations from across the city:

Once I make the circle bigger (about ~2km), it shows no observations, as it should:

My observations mostly do not have accuracy radiuses, but this doesn’t seem to matter - this bird observation https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/298659543 shows up, despite the accuracy circle being 84m (way too small to overlap), with the search circle being about 8km away and only covering a small bit of the Thames:

Description of problem:

Step 1: Create a circle with a small radius (less than 2km?).

Step 2: Notice that you’ll pick up observations miles out from the circle’s radius. This doesn’t seem to happen with custom rectangles.

Step 3: Expand the circle’s radius. Once it’s big enough, it’ll search correctly, and show you only observations within the area.

2 Likes

This seems to be a bug with the api v2, which was just recently activated for the Explore page.
Specifically, searches where the radius is at least 1 work as expected, but searches where the radius is less than 1 don’t work correctly.

Compare
https://api.inaturalist.org/v2/observations/species_counts?lat=51.30376895574157&lng=-0.18203753804374667&radius=1&user_id=jamie-aa (0 results)
to
https://api.inaturalist.org/v2/observations/species_counts?lat=51.30376895574157&lng=-0.18203753804374667&radius=0.9&user_id=jamie-aa (1594 results)

api v1 didn’t have this problem, so when Explore used v1, it wasn’t an issue
https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations/species_counts?lat=51.30376895574157&lng=-0.18203753804374667&radius=0.9&user_id=jamie-aa (0 results, as expected)

3 Likes

Thanks for reporting this. As @jwidness noted we deployed a change this week to have the website observations search/explore page use v2 of our API. It appears the observation search v2 API endpoint had a bug where it was ignoring searches with a radius value less than 1 (it was using the default radius value of 10km). We just released a potential fix for this problem. Please let us know if you notice any other problems with the Explore page search results.

4 Likes

Seems to be working as expected now, thank you!

2 Likes