inat places
Ken-ichi
Been a long time since we've written about any updates, but there are
a couple rolling out right soon, so here's one of them iNaturalist
Places. Yes, kind of like places on some other sites, but on iNat,
each place has a check list of the taxa that occur there. It can also
have other, more specialized check lists restricted to certain taxa.
Who makes these lists? You do. You can also import or create new
places if you want.
You can check all this out at
and here are some places I've been fleshing out as examples:
http://inaturalist.org/places/5302
http://inaturalist.org/places/6696
We haven't linked to it anywhere yet, but I'll get it up in the header
soon (right after I rework the header). You'll probably also notice a
bias toward CA in the existing places. We imported a big database of
CA open space areas, which accounts for that, but there should also be
every US state and county. If you know about GIS and know of a good
shapefile of parks and other open space in your area, let us know and
we can work on importing them.
We'd love to hear your feedback, ideas, or any bugs you might find.
-ken-ichi
Tomio
One:
If you go into a place (e.g. http://inaturalist.org/places/6716 ) and mouse over an image in the filmstrip whose medium-sized image has not already been viewed, the recent observations shift back and forth a bit in their container. It looks like the border of the observation list is disappearing temporarily.
This only seems to happen in Windows/Firefox (works fine in IE8 and Chrome, haven't checked Mac browsers), and only when the entire page fits in the browser window (i.e. no scrollbars for the full page). It happens on the first mouseover of each image per page load.
Two:
If you do a search in Places Near, click into a place, then back out (using the browser's back button), the map recenters on your local area (presumably by IP?) but the search term is still whatever you had last entered.
Otherwise it's looks great! I love the region-specific checklists. Would it be possible to use user-submitted photos there, if they exist? It might be useful to have photos in the local context in case, for example, a bird might only be seen with winter plumage in a given area. A picture of summer plumage wouldn't be as helpful in identification. I can see how there would be a photo quality assurance issue here, so if not, no worries.
--
-Tomio
Vishal Bhave
Vishal Bhave.
Ken-ichi
Udi: oops. I fixed it, will release tonight.
Tomio: will look into the Windows Firefox thing tonight. I fixed the
non-sticky place query, will release tonight. List-specific photos is
a great idea, but maybe something for further down the road.
Vishal: are you asking to have taxa that people have observed in a
place automatically added to that place's checklist in the same way
that life lists work? I'm a little hesitant due to data quality
issues, but we *could* just have a background process that just looks
at observations with 2 or more agreeing identifications, and adds
those to places in which they occur. There are some technical hurdles
there, but it could be done.
-ken-ichi
Vishal Bhave
Ken-ichi
So it *should* be doing this. Every hour we have a process that looks
for taxa that have been added to check lists in the past hour, and
tries to add those taxa to the check list of the parent place. So if
you add a species to the Ratnagiri check list at 3:30 and the process
runs at 4pm, it will see that your listing was new and attempt to add
that taxon to the Maharashta list. This means that parent lists won't
be synced immediately after you add taxa to a child list, but it will
happen eventually. If you compare the Maharashta check list
(http://inaturalist.org/check_lists/6984) with the Ratnagiri check
list (http://inaturalist.org/check_lists/7134) you'll see they're
identical at the moment.
That said, there have been cases where the process breaks down, and
I'm not 100% sure what's going wrong, so if you notice a list getting
out of sync with the lists of its child places, let us know and we can
sync them manually.
I should probably document this somewhere, but where...
-ken-ichi
Vishal Bhave
Vishal Bhave.