Incorporate the use of user-drawn polygons as search parameters for projects.
Description of need:
to reduce the burden that place creation puts on the system
speed up the creation of a project by not having to search for a suitable place or create a place
simplify creation of locations such as the circular/rectngular/polygon area around properties/neighbourhoods/schools/5km radius/town/parks and etc
Feature request details:
This could use the rectangle and circle drawing tools present on the Explore page type of script instead of actual iNat places.
Not part of this vote but a consideration would be to allow multiple polygons or a combination of polygons and places.
I recently used observations near my home in a paper I wrote, but couldn’t find a way to make the location parameter work to only include the observations near me and not across the whole city, too. It would have been very helpful if I could have drawn the boundary and created a project just to be able to include a link or citation to the project in my paper. I can’t be the only researcher who’s ever struggled with this issue.
You could try creating the search on GBIF (I think some basic polygons can be created in search?). GBIF provides a doi for each dataset downloaded and is the preferred way to download/reference iNat data for research publications anyway. Unless all the observations are yours and you can guarantee them remaining unchanged in the project, a project will never be static and not suitable for reproducibility standards for most/all scientific applications.
It wasn’t something being published, this was just a paper to report on my observations and observations made by a family member that helped me. Just referencing iNat was fine for this, but I’ll try what you suggested in the future.
