Viewing existing community curated Places

[Tim. Reichard]

Does iNat have a map view of existing community curated Places?  Or a way to look inside a standard Place (like a country or county) and see which c.c. places are under it in the place hierarchy? 

Mostly I'm looking for a way to see if a boundary has already been drawn for a particular park or land feature but am not sure if I have used the right search terms in the Place name search.  So I'm looking for a second way to see what already exists so I don't create a duplicate.

Tim

[Scott Loarie]

Hi Tim,

Unfortunately no. That would be really cool though. Now that a lot of the observation browsing role of places is being handled by the observations page (e.g. http://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=1), we've been meaning to revisit places (e.g. http://www.inaturalist.org/places/united-states) and make them more focused for creating/managing places & lists. Adding ways to visualize the place hierarchy might be a nice thing to add there. 

Just for fun, I exported all of what we're calling community curated places (e.g. all places minus the standard set I mentioned in an earlier post http://inaturalist.tumblr.com/post/140814239443/inat-standard-places). It looks about as I expected (which is brutal):

We're making changes now that restrict how big community curated places can be. The creation of large 'continent size' places like some of the ones seen here really do a number on our system. And now that we have a standard set of places and nicer bounding-box query capabilities the creation of any more really big places shouldn't be necessary.  It would be great to get rid of some of these duplicate continents, but it turns out alot of people are using them (projects etc.). If you are using them and want to migrate any content to the new Standard continents that would be a step in that direction.

There's also alot of duplicated Administrative level data from previous imports from GADM that we made back in 2013 and couldn't match when doing this recent Standard update that we're slowly cleaning up. There's also a lot of really good park data in here that I hope we can find better ways to surface.

Scott

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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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[Charlie Hohn]

i should look into getting you a shapefile of Vermont state parks and WMAs. Would you be interested? I've already uploaded a fwe. I can also just do them as I get to them but there are lots so who knows how long that would take.

============================
Charlie Hohn
Montpelier, Vermont

[Kent McFarland]

Charlie,

I uploaded Green Mountain NF long ago (see http://www.inaturalist.org/places/green-mountain-national-forest-vt-us) and people like having that. You can easily get files here: http://vcgi.vermont.gov/opendata

Just type in ANR. It would be cool to have state parks and WMA for VT. I also uploaded every single town in Vermont. Conservation commissions love that.

Kent

[AfriBats]

Hi Scott

We're making changes now that restrict how big community curated places can be. The creation of large 'continent size' places like some of the ones seen here really do a number on our system. And now that we have a standard set of places and nicer bounding-box query capabilities the creation of any more really big places shouldn't be necessary.  It would be great to get rid of some of these duplicate continents, but it turns out alot of people are using them (projects etc.). If you are using them and want to migrate any content to the new Standard continents that would be a step in that direction.

I'd be happy to migrate stuff from large community curated places to the new standard ones (I've already done that for the AfriBats project). The big however is not losing effort that went into these. Regarding the various "Africas" and "Europes", I'd be mostly concerned with losing species manually added to the respective checklists as described here
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/inaturalist/-5yxetsgL2Q/vAupCPTTAAAJ

It also seems that quite a lot of the projects being linked to these large places are only so because their project places are children of these larger places:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/inaturalist/-5yxetsgL2Q/vAupCPTTAAAJ
So if the smaller, community curated places could become children of the next larger standard place, many community curated places might then become obsolete.

Cheers, Jakob