It seems to be my projects named Kaipatiki Creek zone Aa....etc through to Zd....I have not today edited the Places they use (which I would have thought were all made in iNaturalist.NZ),. These Zone Projects seem to have lost their Places, so are picking up the world obs...I cannot reinstitute the Places as I cannot find the places in either portal, either in the Projects Place search or in Search Places.I will try adding any place I can to these projects in the interim. Perhaps I have deleted a Parent place or something?
Hi Jenny
Can you supply some links to examples... and ofr each a brief description of what you think is wrong with it, or how it has changed to what you expected? I’ll take a look and see if I can help
cheers
Mark Tutty
kiwif...@gmail.com
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Jenny,
Seeing as you have a bit of work to sort that out, can I make a suggestion before you do...
When you are dealing with zones or grids within an area, it could be easier to manage if you set a tag value as the zone. Then all the observations are under the one project, but are still filterable by zone.
I had a similar situation out at Hackfalls... they had old grid maps that were referenced throughout the catalogue, and I needed to use that to confirm I had matched up the correct entries to my photos of the trees from when I visited. I used a field rather than a tag, as I envisage others needing to take over the work at some point and so it needed to be an enduring process, but for what you are doing I would imagine tags being a little easier to work with.
Of course, if you are wanting to have observations automatically pick up their zone from the GPS location of the photo, then I think the way you have structured it might be better
cheers
Mark Tutty
kiwif...@gmail.com
From: kaipatiki_naturewatch
Sent: Wednesday, 19 December 2018 11:20 AM
To: iNaturalist
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It does look like your places were created as children of the global portal created parent place(s). I am confused though as to why it seems to be fixing itself. Perhaps the orphaned places are being re-indexed in the background and/or being adopted to new parent places? Strange. I hesitate to suggest that maybe waiting a while might give it a chance to catch up?
As to recreating the zones, and I assume you mean pins, not flags (different meaning in iNauralist!): You could try exporting an observation set as a kml file, loading it into another application that does mapping, create the boundary around the observation pins, and then export from there a kml of the new boundary. Then import that back to iNaturalist to set as the boundaries for the new location/zone. Quite a bit of fluffing around though, maybe someone else will have a better solution?
cheers
Mark Tutty
kiwif...@gmail.com
From: kaipatiki_naturewatch
Sent: Wednesday, 19 December 2018 12:28 PM
To: iNaturalist
Subject: [inaturalist] Re: URGENT Support needed ! Have deleted some Projectsand Places accidentally made in the Global portal,and now a whole lot of myprojects are picking up millions of obs!
this is no longer urgent since it no longer seems to be affecting other users, but I think I have identified the cause.
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I can find the place (Yb) when I search places, I can add an observation inside that location and it auto adds to the project, and if I join the project it shows that it is part of that project on the observation view. All looks to be working as it should? I am searching from the nz portal. I’m not sure what is going wrong for you Jenny, except that maybe the background indexing has now had a chance to catch up?
some time after posting here I found all the new zones and the three remaining ones were discoverable on the global portal. I added a new NZ place to them as parent and then they were discoverable in NZ portal too, appearing with NZ after their name.
So I made a few more Places, adding the NZ parent, and all seems well with those.
My Zone Projects using these Places, and my Zone Collection Project, were no longer discoverable in NZ.
Thanks Mark. I will be going out for a few hrs soon so may not reply for a bit.
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Kaipatiki creek zone Zb shows up for me on the NZ portal...
https://inaturalist.nz/places/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=kaipatiki+creek+zone&commit=Search
I use the search terms “Kaipatiki Creek zone” above and it showed up as the top entry in the list of a couple dozen similar named projects.
It is strange that the observation you give as an example does not show as being in the zone Zb project, despite being within the bounds for it. You own the observation, as well as the project, and you are therefore a member of it too, so it should show that project in the list. It shows 26 other projects that it has matched up with, and so I can only assume one of two possible problems... a) the indexing is lagging, but surely it would have caught up by the time I viewed it (you sent link 1.5 hours ago), or b) there is a limit to how many projects can show in the observation view.
@tiwane : Is there a limit to how many projects an observation will link into?
@Jenny : Is there a reason why you need this observation to link into 26+ projects? Or are you still adjusting the boundaries of all those projects/places?
cheers
Mark Tutty
kiwif...@gmail.com
From: kaipatiki_naturewatch
Sent: Thursday, 20 December 2018 10:26 PM
To: iNaturalist
Subject: [inaturalist] Re: URGENT Support needed ! Have deleted some Projectsand Places accidentally made in the Global portal,and now a whole lot of myprojects are picking up millions of obs!
The Place Zb is appearing correctly in the Umbrella Project "Kaipatiki Creek Zone Collection Projects" map. I thought I would check the Place Kaipatiki Creek Zb to see if something was wrong eg with the Parent, but it is not discoverable at present. I have tried searching for it in both Gloabl and NZ portals.
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Mark, Each observation shows in and links to just one Zone, which is determined by the coordinates of the obs. That obs was made in Zone Zb and until Dec 19 when I deleted the global-created Place that was the parent of the Zone place, it was linked only to Zone Zb, ie behaved as intended.
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and Mark, I don't have the other 40-odd Places (there are about 60 zones) to adjust, since I deleted what I assume was the Parent place of those Places. I don't know for sure, I am guessing.
I remember at some point during making those places I could no longer find the Place for the whole site, so I had to make a new one.
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Thank you Tony. My overall goal is the reinstatement of the approx 60 places I had made, which disappeared from their associated Collection Projects the day I posted here, Dec 19. I became aware the Places were no longer operating when I checked a Project and saw it had over 15 million observations. On "Edit Project" I found there was no Place assigned. The taxon collected was, correctly, Life. Hence over 15 million observations.
Then I found all, or at least most, of the Projects named "Kaipatiki Creek Zone (eg Aa, Ab etc....to Zd)" were in the same condition, ie. they had no Place.
The Places, each of the same name as its matching Project, could not be found either in the Project editing Window or in the Places search field.
If I had been aware of the Exclusion fields I could have limited them that way, but I wasn't, so the quickest way I could limit them was to add one of the 3 " Kaipatiki Creek Zone (...)" places that remained
discoverable.
If I could discover those 60 odd Places I would add them back into the Projects, and all would be well.
Before this occurred, I was going through inaturalist global portal finding some of the Places I had made which had at some point disappeared, because I had just learned in this forum that if a Place was made in the Global port it can't be found in the NZ portal. Having learned that I realized that was where some of the Places I that had become unfindable were, and solved a mystery. Over the last 6 months or so had had to make duplicates of a number of Places because they were not able to be found for editing.
When this occurred, ie numerous of my Zone projects having 15 million Obs, since I knew I had not deleted about 57 Places without noticing, the only explanation for them vanishing suddenly was that one of the Places I had deleted was the cause of all the others disappearing. Place discoverability being dependent on Parent existing seemed a likely explanation, as one of the Places I deleted contained, geographically, all the Zone Places that were missing.
Before deleting this Place I had made a new one in the NZ portal, and replaced the Globally created place in a number of other Projects, which were and are fine.
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Thanks Tony. Is there any way my Places could be retrieved from backup or Something? The ones you saw are the ones I started making again, but as you can see from the map in the trial process numerous edits are required to make each Place, and there are other errors and delays such as waiting for edits to appear so one can makever the next place adjacent to it, and every now and again a Place won't save due to the Latitude error bug...so it would take a couple of months to make them again. I had intended to use these Zones for a funded Project so if that could be avoided it would be great!
Hiya Tony,
It might be worth looking at the projects side of things, as it is what caused all this in the first place.
Back when we were NatureWatch.org.nz as our portal, I was involved in a bioblitz, and the organiser had created the project while he was logged in through iNaturalist.org. On that occasion we could not find the project when we searched for it (we were logged in through the nz portal), and we discovered that if you selected “View projects from everywhere” then it would show up. This had nothing to do with the places that were associated with the project, it seemed to be related to where you were signed into when you created the project. The default for us on the nz portal seems to be to show only projects created in the nz portal.
When Jenny was having issues with some projects not appearing in the search, I suggested that this might still be an issue. I think she tested it, and it proved to be the case. I also think Jenny has deleted places, and in particular “parent places”, when she should have been deleting and replacing just the projects themselves... although she may have determined that she was having the same issue with places that were created in the different portals... that part I am not sure about.
I think what she is looking for now, is if there is a way to “undelete” what she has deleted in the places.
Jenny: If you read this, can you indicate whether I have got all this right?
cheers
Mark Tutty
kiwif...@gmail.com
From: Tony Iwane
Sent: Saturday, 22 December 2018 10:51 AM
To: iNaturalist
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Sorry that is not very clear...The "Places that have apparently been deleted " refers to the approx 60 places that vanished suddenly from their Projects.
The Places I had deleted were a few not in use , having been replaced in their associated Projects by a NZ made Place.
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Sorry that is not very clear...The "Places that have apparently been deleted " refers to the approx 60 places that vanished suddenly from their Projects.
The Places I had deleted were a few not in use , having been replaced in their associated Projects by a NZ made Place.
On 22/12/2018 4:30 PM, "kaipatiki_naturewatch" <jennychri...@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks Mark,--Yes, the reason I deleted all globally made Places was twofold:1. I would sometimes come across them in eg Project edit, but as they were not editable because could not be found in Find Places, they were problematic, to say the least. Once you explained they could be found in the global portal, I located and deleted them. (After first making duplicate places in NZ portal, and adding the new ones to the Projects dependent on them).2. I felt bad about having unused places cluttering up the Search for other people.The Places that have apparently (?) been deleted were not deleted by me, but by the system when I deleted their Parent place.These Places don't need a Parent place, I just assumed it was helpful to the data collection overall to fill in the "Parent" field when creating Places - ie just because the field was there I suppose:)So if that one place could be undeleted, perhaps all my Zone places would reappear, and function as before in their collection Projects? Or I could re-link the Projects to the Places easily enough.Jenny
On Wednesday, December 19, 2018 at 11:07:09 AM UTC+13, kaipatiki_naturewatch wrote:This is no doubt creating problems for others...What should I recreate, where? Thanks.
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I have just repeated your steps that you took:
“Kaipatiki Creek Zone Collection Projects” is there... you just have to click “View projects from everywhere”... ie it is a global portal created project.
“Kaipatiki Creek Zone Ub” is also a project that was created in the global portal. Ie you need to “View projects from everywhere”
You don’t tell us what the “new place” is, so I can’t check that one for you
I have no idea what this “NZ after the place name” is all about... can you give screenshots of that? Is it something you have added to the name yourself, or is it something that iNaturalist is tacking on?
There should be no reason why you would be jumping from portal to portal, unless you are following url links provided in comments etc, or using bookmarks that you might have made to pages accessed from the other portal. I know I had to go and update all my Naturwatch.org.nz bookmarks to the new domain, and I was surprised at how much I rely on bookmarks in my day to day use of the site.
cheers
Mark Tutty
kiwif...@gmail.com
From: kaipatiki_naturewatch
Sent: Sunday, 23 December 2018 8:33 AM
To: iNaturalist
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I have looked at the umbrella project map, showing the zones as you described. I hope you don’t take offence at this, but it looks a bit of a mess. There are gaps between zones, overlaps all over the place, and no apparent logic to their definition apart from following roads at certain points. Is it meant to be that way? I mean, is there some requirement that those boundaries on the areas be like that, or is it a product of how you framed them?
I have had the feeling from the outset that you might be making this more complicated than it needs to be. Are there different organisations that you need to apply to for funding, and hence the different zones? Are the zones reflective of geographical boundaries? Do they represent stages of a restoration? I guess I am asking why the need for so many zones, and why are they so haphazard in their definition.
I would recommend scrapping them all. Delete all places and all projects related to Kaipatiki Creek Restoration. Go back to the drawing board, and work out what zones you need. Keep it simple, an age old principle that works! If you need to, approach council about having someone with GIS skills help you to define the areas and save them as kml files for you to upload into your iNaturalist place definitions. They can use whatever software they are most comfortable with, as the goal here is to create place boundaries that are robust.
Then once you have the boundaries for just the zones you need, create the “places” in iNaturalist. Make sure you are logged into the same portal for all of them. It doesn’t matter if it is global or NZ, but for consistency later on, choose one and stick to it. Be consistant in the naming. I think the naming you were using looks fine. Either DON’T assign parents for them... or make the parent for all of them the SAME, and don’t EVER delete the parent! (That one was a worrying surprise to me too!)
When you have all the places created, you can create the projects associated with them. Again, make sure you create them all from the same portal, just so that things are consistant throughout!
It seems to me that making so many projects is just making the task way more complicated than it needs to be. When I catalogued the Gisborne Botanical Gardens, I was in part working from zones or areas that had been defined in the management plan. For consistency I choose to utilise the same areas, but I still only had one project and one place. I had a field in each observation that contained the zone. In fact, I think it was either just in the description, or placed in a tag. Regardless, I could find all plants within a zone quite easily with a search, and I extracted the whole project out to a kml file that I loaded into Google Earth and structured as a flyover tour of the gardens. It was somewhat crude and I would not call it finished, but no one was paying me to finish it, so I never bothered. I had satisfied in my mind that I COULD do it if the need arose.
Now, I think I can see why you created the multitude of projects, in that you wanted to make the observations in an area, and then have those help you to draw the boundaries for that zone. Is this correct? If so... I’ll revisit here my concerns I expressed to you a while ago about GPS locations and camera distance. If not, then ignore this paragraph. GPS has a +/-20m accuracy, although that is at the extreme end and you are likely to experience +/-2m in a location such as Kaipatiki Creek. On top of that, there is a +/-2m margin of error in the alignment of the map to the actual lat/lon coordinates, largely due to topographical features. These are all minor compared to the largest source of location error, which is YOUR CAMERA! When you take a photo of something, the GPS tag receives the location of the camera, not the subject. If you are standing 20m away from what you are taking a photo of, then your pin is going to be 20m +/-4m in error. If you walk through the bush taking photographs of things anywhere from 1m away to 40m away (as was the case in the example that I showed you back when I first raised this with you), then your margin of error is 0m-44m, and that is assuming you don’t have a bad GPS signal from the overhead tree canopy etc. In the example I gave you at the time, I could work out where you were standing when you took the photo based on the angles of the buildings in the shot, and I can tell you that you were approx 40m from the subject, and the GPS pin location was approx 20m to the left of where you were standing when you took the photo. Now, this is an inherent problem with camera based GPS... but if I am right about how you have created the boundaries of your zones, then that is an inaccuracy you are building in right from the outset. On top of this, observations you make subsequent to this exercise are going to compound the problem, in that they will also potentially be out of accuracy by the same factors. You are in effect working with an accuracy of close to +/-100m! If your zones were hectares in size, then it would be less of a problem, but from the zones collection map, I can see that some of them are barely over 20m wide. The impression I have is that you are trying to paint the Mona Lisa with a 100mm house brush!
Especially given the recent problems, I would seriously consider re-scoping the project to make it simpler!
cheers
Mark Tutty
kiwif...@gmail.com
From: kaipatiki_naturewatch
Sent: Sunday, 23 December 2018 9:02 AM
To: iNaturalist
Subject: Re: [inaturalist] Re: URGENT Support needed ! Have deleted someProjects and Places accidentally made in the Global portal,and now a wholelot of my projects are picking up millions of obs!
@tiwane Checking the map in my Zone Collection Project, I don't see Zone Ab mapped. The Project https://inaturalist.nz/projects/kaipatiki-creek-zone-ab lists the Project, and Project edit shows the Place Ab, NZ.
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Every location is like that though, Jenny! Find me a track anywhere in New Zealand that doesn’t change in character many times along it’s length. It doesn’t mean we need a separate project for every 20m section of the track! Every bioblitz we have done here in Gisborne has been like that... one was a lagoon, where on one side we had the open sea and the other the lagoon/estuary proper... and then the shell covered tip of the bar where the godwits were... there was a small area where the locals would come and hold strange rites at night (a goat skull atop totems etc), another area was an obvious dumping ground for garden waste, and so on. Each little part isn’t going to be a separate project in and of itself! That just makes the information so much more complicated than it needs to be! If you take it to it’s extreme, every single tree is a micro habitat completely different to the one right next to it! If I make a project of my street, I am not going to break it up into a hundred different sub projects because every house has different plants to the others! I think if you have broken your project down into 60 different projects, then you are taking it too far. Now, to be fair, this is just my opinion, and your view of what you are trying to accomplish will necessitate something a little different to what I would envisage.
Take the Gisborne Botanical Gardens project as an example. We managed that with two separate projects... one for the cultivated plants, and the other for all the stuff that turns up of it’s own accord (weeds bugs birds etc). There were “zones” for the different areas, such as the Australian Garden and the Playground Garden, the Tree Lawn and the Japanese Lake Garden etc... some 20 defined areas that could be handled independently... but they were still all in the same project. That Gisborne Botanical Gardens project was my introduction and training in iNaturalist, so I endeavoured to keep it as simple as I could. I don’t view that project as completed, or overly successful, but it did help me learn how to use iNaturalist as a recording tool, and we have subsequently gone on to use iNaturalist for some great projects that have had some terrific outcomes.
More recently, I was involved in the Hackfalls project, for which we created 3 seperate projects... the cultivated plants, the wild stuff and then an umbrella project called “Biodiversity at Hackfalls” (or something like that) to combine both projects so a picture of all biodiversity there could be seen. It was suggested that I was “going over the top” with that third project! I ended up creating a 4th project, as the management of the arboretum were so impressed with what we could do with iNaturalist, that they wanted to explore using it to manage the catalogue of the collection.
Kaipatiki Creek is your first iNaturalist project experience. I just think you should be keeping it simple, and learning how to use the tool well before looking to achieve significant outcomes with it.
cheers
Mark Tutty
kiwif...@gmail.com
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I noticed several locations I used have disappeared also.
On Sat, Dec 22, 2018 at 1:52 PM Kaipatiki Naturewatch <jennychri...@gmail.com> wrote:
Sorry that is not very clear...The "Places that have apparently been deleted " refers to the approx 60 places that vanished suddenly from their Projects.
The Places I had deleted were a few not in use , having been replaced in their associated Projects by a NZ made Place.
On 22/12/2018 4:30 PM, "kaipatiki_naturewatch" <jennychri...@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks Mark,--Yes, the reason I deleted all globally made Places was twofold:1. I would sometimes come across them in eg Project edit, but as they were not editable because could not be found in Find Places, they were problematic, to say the least. Once you explained they could be found in the global portal, I located and deleted them. (After first making duplicate places in NZ portal, and adding the new ones to the Projects dependent on them).2. I felt bad about having unused places cluttering up the Search for other people.The Places that have apparently (?) been deleted were not deleted by me, but by the system when I deleted their Parent place.These Places don't need a Parent place, I just assumed it was helpful to the data collection overall to fill in the "Parent" field when creating Places - ie just because the field was there I suppose:)So if that one place could be undeleted, perhaps all my Zone places would reappear, and function as before in their collection Projects? Or I could re-link the Projects to the Places easily enough.Jenny
On Wednesday, December 19, 2018 at 11:07:09 AM UTC+13, kaipatiki_naturewatch wrote:This is no doubt creating problems for others...What should I recreate, where? Thanks.
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