Hi all,
I can’t find a reference to this on a search of forum topics, my apologies if this is already covered somewhere. Is there any way to search observations only from “Western North America” or “Western United States”? My expertise, such as it is, is mostly limited to spiders from the western US and I find myself needing to search for observations in each western state separately if I don’t want to deal with tons of eastern US spiders. I understand that there could be some discussion of how exactly to define this area, but it’s done in field guides all the time - maybe west of the Mississippi River, for example.
thanks! A radius doesn’t really work for my situation, since I don’t want a search area that is anywhere near circular. Is the Redo search in Map available directly from the Identify page? That’s where I’m working from, not the Explore page. I’m not quite sure how to make that “bounding box” I see in your image.
If you move the map around that orange button should appear. Then you can click Fliters>Identify to go to the Identify page. There isn’t a map view in the Identify page.
OK, thanks, that seems to work, although certainly a bit cumbersome to move the map around and try to get it to be placed correctly. Is there any way to request a “Western North America” region to be available on Identify? Or to identify in multiple states at once (e.g. add California, Arizona and New Mexico to one search page)?
I have a related comment - when I’m looking in the suggested ID’s pane on a species, I often want to limit it to the Caribbean, where the species was observed. Unfortunately, that is not a place, so I use Latinamerica and the Caribbean. Sometimes, e.g.g for high level or populous taxa, I get a lot of hits then and the suggestions become sluggish to scroll. I can filter for the area this way if I wanted to go and do ID’s like on the ID pane, but it won’t help (right?) if I was identifying something I otherwise stumbled across and want to filter suggestions this way. I often just want to see quickly what the species of that taxon that live in the area even look like, and it’s sparked by a particular observation so it only comes up in this context. I tried therefore to add the Caribbean as a place myself. Unfortunately, the region is too large to add. So I tried the Greater Antilles, because the Lesser Antilles (or the windward islands, one of them) is already a place, but for some reason that did not work.
I would also appreciate a place for the Caribbean. When I searched I found a couple places that seem like they would be it, but they’re all just single points. It should be possible to create places for all the different regions within the Caribbean and combine them with a URL search like bouteloua suggested, but at that point it wasn’t worth it for me.
