Location reporting

[edanko]

Would it be possible for the system to automatically generate the country and province (ideally with the biggest regions coming first) when displaying locality information?

When I open an observation, the location sometimes comes up as "Royal Hills Farm" or latitude/longitude coordinates. These are unhelpful to me, and I am forced to zoom out on the map until I recognize the location. When going through a location-relevant taxon and identifying observations, having to keep zooming out on the map gets tiring.

(While I'm at it, would there be any way for an admin to add more biogeographical regions to the "Places" part of iNaturalist? Right now, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, the Palearctic ecozone, Eastern North America, Western North America, the Oriental ecozone, and presumably others as well aren't available, and these would be enormously helpful when processing observations to assign IDs.)

Thanks!
edanko

[Scott Loarie]

Just click on 'Details' in the lower left of the map on any observation page to see the Standard iNat places (e.g. Country, State/Province etc.) listed, e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9666330

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Scott R. Loarie, Ph.D.
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California Academy of Sciences
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[bouteloua]

If you click "Details" (to bottom right of map), it should show the continent/country/state/county.

[Chris Cheatle]

On the Observation, under the map on the right click on Details, that will show virtually everything you are asking about.

[edanko]

Good point, but that doesn't seem to work from within the "Identify" view.

[Mark Rosenstein]

This has long irked me as well.  When going through the Identify pages, often the text shows a local name that isn't meaningful to me, and the map is also zoomed in too far to recognize anything.  I may have to zoom out 4 or 5 times to see anything in the map I recognize to know where in the world we are.  Yes, I know I can switch to the suggestions tab to see how it labels the place, but that's slow too.  For those of use who do hundreds of identifications per day, having all of the information on the first tab would be really helpful.

-Mark

[James Bailey]

It wouldn't hurt to have a quickly available "tag" that at least showed the continent of the observation, outside of details which doesn't always open on my PC.

[bouteloua]

Would it be difficult to add the location "Details" popout to the Identify page? 

[Brian G]

It would be helpful to have access to the data from the "Identify" view, as suggested, especially since I use iNaturalist site on my phone a lot.

Cassi's suggested mock-up would be amazing.

Thanks,

Brian Gooding (@briangooding)

[Tony Iwane]

I see the country displayed when I use Identify (see attachment), which for me is usually large enough to orient myself without zooming the map. Are others not seeing this? Can you give specific examples of situations where this comes into play? (Mark, I know you do a lot of underwater stuff, so you're likely to be looking at observations near less land).

Would you like the map to be zoomed out maybe one level by default? Or would something like Cassi's mock-up suffice?

edanko, unfortunately we aren't able to add really large places like you're suggesting, as it would be costly for the site. We would have re-index many observations if those places are added, slowing down the site and enlarging out database significantly.

Tony Iwane

[cassi saari]

Whenever someone has typed in a location manually, it does not auto-generate that type of city/county/state/country information in the location field.

A few examples attached.

cassi

[Tony Iwane]

"typed in a location manually" via which screen/field? I tried to do that on the Add Observations page and it still added parent locations. Also if you can provide URLs that would be great.

Tony

[cassi saari]

​Hmm, looks like it's called "Locality Notes," on the Add Observation screen.

e.g.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?reviewed=any&quality_grade=casual&user_id=bouteloua&on=2018-02-12​

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?reviewed=any&quality_grade=casual%2Cneeds_id%2Cresearch&user_id=sanguinaria33

cassi

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[Tony Iwane]

Ah, OK. Sounds more like a bug with how that field works. In situations like this, perhaps we can display (in Identify) the parent place info, regardless of what Locality notes say. If state and country level places consistently showed up, would that fix the map zoom issue for folks?

Tony

[bouteloua]

It would be great if county/district, state/province/region, and country appeared. Without need to click a dropdown, even better.

I wouldn't personally have much use for seeing the other community curated places within Identify, but I do find county helpful.

cassi

[Mark Rosenstein]

Also, sometimes when the country is displayed, it is incorrect.  See the attachment of the Identify view of https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9860418
I haven't been able to figure out the pattern, but have noticed several times that it was way off, like halfway around the world, not just a few miles.
-Mark

[Russell P]

Ouch! Austrailia, Netherlands, same thing right?!

[edanko]

Thank you so much! The implemented change is a great solution.

cassi

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