colors on maps on species pages

[lelliott]

I'm sure this must be obvious somewhere, but I'm not finding it.  See attached image from Terrapene ornata page (https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/39807-Terrapene-ornata). I'm assuming the states (Checklist Place) with orange are states within the range that don't have observations on iNat. But that's just a guess. And now that I look at a zoomed in map, there are orange counties that have observations and green counties that don't have observations visible within them. Also, where do the range maps come from?

A "question mark" icon (possibly within the Overlays dialog) that describes the elements of the dialog would be helpful. Like the one in the seasonality graph on a species page. Maybe there already is such a link and I'm just missing it.

[Scott Loarie]

There's no legend on that map (I agree that would be good)

1) correct, green places are where the species is listed and there are
RG observations, orange places are where the specie sis listed but
there are no RG observations
2) the maps come from IUCN except in instances when species were
split/merged in which case they may have been manually altered to
reflect the taxonomic concept changes

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Scott R. Loarie, Ph.D.
Co-director, iNaturalist.org
California Academy of Sciences
55 Music Concourse Dr
San Francisco, CA 94118
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[lelliott]

Well, now I'm confused. When I zoom in, there's a county that's orange with observations and a green county below it without visible observations. And then there are RG observations outside of colored counties.  Obviously I'm just not understanding something.

Thanks for the info on the range maps. That's what I assumed, but wasn't sure.

[Scott Loarie]

Whats going on there is that Terrapene ornata has an atlas
https://www.inaturalist.org/atlases/632
You can read more about Atlases here
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/atlases but they prevent listings
from being automatically generated/updated from observations
The idea is that for atlased species curators curate an atlas
independent of observations so they can be used to put observations in
context (e.g. 'this observation must be misID'd or important, its way
out of range') rather than having that observation update the listing
so the two can't be compared

Automated listings on iNat populate up, e.g. if someone listed a
county in Georgia it would also create a listing for the state. So we
have to also turn off automatically creating/updating listings at the
county level even though the atlas is at the state level for this
species. Creating an atlas thus essentially just freezes listed taxa
where they are and assumes the curator who made the atlas maintain
them. This atlas is at the state level, so the atlas curators probably
just aren't thinking about counties.

But you can manually find and update listed taxa for counties by
searching for the places e.g.
https://www.inaturalist.org/listed_taxa/21272850
and there's a little 'refresh' button to manually have it check for
the presence of RG observations

[lelliott]

Thanks. Seems I've got a lot to learn.