Location Names May Not Be Accurate Due to Poor System
When I first joined NW the Location Name for each obs would be accurate, as I could put the place in, move the pin to the right location and that was it.
About six months ago the system changed so that when I moved to pin, the location name changed to what the system thought it should be. I did try and get them to leave that part as it was but to no avail so each obs I now have to change the location name back to what it should be grrrr.....
Henderson Bay locates to the ocean (fair enough) but as soon as I move the pin onto land it changes, depending on where on land (still in Henderson Bay) to Northland, or Houhora 0484. This would be like an obs done in Mission Bay with the pin in the water changing to Auckland as soon as it goes onto land.
But that is not the worst ....
I go up and down Ninety Mile Beach (Oneroa a Tohe, affectionately called the Tohe), and will always take photos of obs. Now when I am out there, I know I am out there, there is the ocean on one side and the dunes on the other. However, now if I do an obs from the Tohe, depending on where the pin is along the Tohe, it will change to any of the following:
Cape Reinga - yet no lighthouse in sight or 2 seas meeting
Te Kao - Located on the reaches of the Parengarenga Harbour on the east coast - the Tohe is the west coast
Ngataki - Located inland and on the main road north
Pukenui - Located on the Houhora Harbour, east coast
Waiharara - Inland farming settlement
Waipapakauri - ok, so there is an onramp there to the Tohe but the Tohe is the Tohe
Ahipara - the settlement at the bottom of the Tohe
Ninety Mile Beach IS NOT Cape Reinga, Te Kao, Ngataki, Pukenui, Waiharara, Waipapakauri or Ahipara but those who changed the system can not seem to grasp that ....
Now if I only did a few obs now and again I would change the location name back to what it should be after having the system change it thinking it knows better the lands of tangata whenua than tangata whenua. However I have just spent one week putting up a week of obs from a week ago and it has been driving me nuts and I am sick of it ....
So I have three options:
1. Stop using Nature Watch
This may give you an indication of my frustration over the last six months. However, I enjoy photographing around my beautiful lands and especially when I get comments like, "that's strange" "new northern limit" "never seen that colour before" etc :) I also know that here is not an area that has alot of obs but it is a biodiversity hotspot and my obs do help contribute to the knowledge base of what I find.
I have also met wonderful people, learnt so much and seen so much, not just from what I put up, but from what others put up as well.
2. Not put so many obs up
I could limit the amount I put up and only put up new things I find which would cut the amount of obs I put up to probably no more than 10 per month and change the system location name
3. let the system think it knows better
Just let the system use what it wants to use which would mean that there would be strange obs, such as sharks in Waiharara, or pingao in Ngataki
I am still thinking about what I am going to do, or not as the case may be, but at this point in time, I will let the system overide the knowlege of tangata whenua and put whatever location name it wants, but I will put a copy and paste disclaimer on all my obs that I have to do now to get up to date. After that, we will see.
Comments
So true @kiwifergus!
I have also found that it we use the place name and not move the pin it will have the right place, but the location accuracy is wrong and the data probably not good for science - imagine a place where so much marine life and land life are all, well, in the middle of the ocean! LOL
Hmm, may try that!
My 2cents @tangatawhenua . If you enter a manual latitude and longitude rather than a placename it will be fine (I think). If your image file doesn't have the lat/long stored in it (or it is inaccurate) you can get a better lat/long from elsewhere from another service by doing the same "move the pin" action there. Try entering a general lat long for Henderson Bay into Geolocator ( http://tools.freeside.sk/geolocator/geolocator.html ), zoom in as necessary, then "move the pin" to the right place on the beach, then copy over the new lat/long to the lat long fields in NatureWatch (Inaturalist). That should do it. I use that technique in Geolocator a lot for the World Register of Marine Species data entry.
Kia ora for your suggestion @readgb - it is appreciated :)
I did as you suggested, went to the URL, got a general Henderson Bay lat / long, moved the pin, copied the new co-ordinates into NW for a new obs and the placename is one of the "general defaults", ie Houhora 0484.
My underwater camera does have gps but it either doesn't turn on (I think that is because of the 20m cliffs I am usually around as it seems to turn on when not close by cliffs) or it is not accurate - a Macroctopus maorum photographed this year that had gps co-ordinates was apparently located in the mid dunes when the photos show that it is in water! LOL Then sometimes it may work :)
I have realised by you replying that the location is important, so I will not do the "accept the default pin location" as that would not be good for data.
Once again, I appreciate you taking time out to reply :)
Yes, I think an accurate pin location is all that really matters.
And when you place a pin location the lat/long appears automatically right?
The pin location is all I normally look at, and the Location Name is not of much relevance to me.
It's like the difference between an organism's common name (which is fairly arbitrary), and it's species name.
I appreciate that it is very annoying to you, but please don't let that reduce the number of your observations.
They are too interesting and valuable to lose!
And who knows, one day the system may change back to how it was, and then the more accurate place names may automatically reappear based on the lat/long of each observation.
BTW, what response did you get from the iNat Admins about this?
@susanhewitt FYI
I am sorry Peter, I really know almost nothing about the map functions. I am not an admin.
Kia ora for your comments @nzshells - I appreciate you taking the time to do so.
Glad you highlighted the importance of the lat/long and you are right, when I move the pin that appears automatically.
When these changes were first mooted there was a link that appeared on our home page about changes and testing it - but do you think I can find that link now? Nope and it seems to have dissapeared in never land to never been seen again. I did look around the iNat site but couldn't find it and also did an intensive search but no such luck in seeing it.
Basically 1 admin thought leaving location was important and the others wanted to use a "standard" as devised by the system they where changing to. I objected to the "standard" because of the above reasons and a few others agreed with me. A few things I raised were fixed, except leaving the name that we put in as the default name - I did raise that a few times but it was ignored then poof - the post disappeared and the new system was brought in and I couldn't find the post or comment anymore.
I like location names and when the system first changed I saw pingao in Kaeo (no way) and tuatua in Ngataki no way unless that was a photo of someone eating them LOL
Intersting point you raise about creating places @kiwifergus. I went to the places link at the top, put in Ninety Mile Beach and I found that I had created it Dec 2015 LOL I remember doing that and making sure that all of the tide and dunes were in it - it is still there. I also found I had added Henderson Bay in Aug 2015.
Clicking on the Observations link on any of those pages brings up the observations that are all within those boundries I set regardless of what wrong location name the system uses.
So the main two places that I roam around in are here. I could set up Tapotupotu which is my new favourite place to hang out as that is not in the Places yet, but we shall see.
Interesting about the glass affecting the GPS - I never thought of waves adding to the mix! There are only 2 cell towers that cover this area - one in Henderson Bay, about 1 1/2kms away from the beach and one across the water on the Karikari Penninsula - we also have shocking cell coverage 0 - 1 bar is the norm, dropouts are the norm and 2+ bars are a shock! LOL
LOL Yep!
Folks, if you have issues with the location names, the place to report problems is http://groups.google.com/group/inaturalist/ or help@inaturalist.org. Please include the URLs of the observations in question and a detailed description of what's going wrong, preferably with a list of steps we can use to replicate your problem.
Much appreciated @kueda - I have sent an email and will report back here in due course.
Interesting to note though, while I was doing the steps and writing them for the email Ninety Mile Beach now actually stays Ninety Mile Beach and does not become any of the other seven places that it used to - so happy about that :D
Have heard back from the email I sent.
Google maps are the "expert" in places now and that is what is used (we will not talk about the road that google maps has put at the end of Henderson Bay Road that cuts through to Otaipango Road but are actually driveways that those people have to chain now because city people who use google maps are visualy challenged and can not tell a road from a driveway thinking they have the right to go there "because that is a road - see?" pointing at google maps and not seeing what is actually in front of them - a driveway)
Ninety Mile beach correcting itself would have been an update by google maps and not this system
I was also given the link to the old upload page https://inaturalist.nz/observations/new which is what I will probably use.
One thing that may have helped was a way to geotag photos even if you do not have a gps setting in the camera (https://vimeo.com/175298466) which I thought would be a great idea! So I got a gps tracker for my phone and it would not pick up a statalite, so I got a satalite locator which took about 4 minutes to even find a satalite and I was not on the beach or by cliffs or in a glasshouse :) Mind you, it picked up once I moved off the stressful deck so I guess even satalites are stress affected LOL
But as @kiwifergus says, "hehe, the price of that view down the home straight ;)"
Just to sympathize, I've found the same thing. Google Maps (and Apple Maps) are pretty awful at naming places in some parts of NZ, especially away from our bigger cities. I've just come to accept that as the state of things right now. iNaturalist, and NatureWatch NZ, have got to query some database to guess place names and Google Maps is good in most places.
As @nzshells said, it's the lat-long that really matters. However, if the automatic place name is wildly off from your lat-long, it could be a cause for confusion. In those cases, it is handy to manually overwrite the location name.
I should add that when you find errors on Google Maps, you can report them to Google. See https://support.google.com/maps/answer/3094088?co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid&hl=en
Appreciate that info @jon_sullivan - I will test that with the google road that is actually 2 driveways before I start hassleing them to fix all of the wrong placenames up these ways :)
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