Where IS the Eastern United States, exactly?
I originally wanted to make this project Caterpillars of Eastern North America, because caterpillars don't have much respect for political boundaries, and because that is the focus area of the main caterpillar field guide that I use (David Wagner's Caterpillars of Eastern North America). However, there is no iNaturalist Place for Eastern North America, and the system doesn't like it when people add new places that are that big, so I opted for the next best thing, which was the eastern US. However, as you will likely notice if you have a look at the place boundary, the polygon for this place was drawn to include a big chunk of New Brunswick, which, last I checked, is not part of the US. Also, the western limit appears to be drawn roughly at the Mississippi, which, although reasonable, is far short of the western limit that Wagner (and a number of other field guide authors, as well as the professor of my college seminar on the history of the "American West") place at the 100th meridian. I tried to update the place boundary, but this process proved less straightforward than I had hoped (even after I got the nice, tidy, new polygon all prepared), which you can read all about on the iNat message board. In the meantime, I may adjust the project rules somewhat to try to refine the project area, although it may take a while to get that done. While the state-by-state approach recommended on the message board might get us close (and would work well for Sibley's range for the Birds of Eastern North America, except for Texas), it's still going to either over- or under-represent the true focus area that I had in mind (likely the former).
What do you think? Where does the eastern part of the country end, in your mind, from a cultural and/or natural history perspective?
Comments
I have updated the project rules, which now require that observations be made in a state at least part of which is east of the 100th meridian. If anyone wants to check the project rules to make sure I didn't leave out any states, please do. This is the best I can do for now, and I would rather be more rather than less inclusive. I also removed the bogus boundary from the project map.
I "googled" around a bit and the Mississippi River does seem to pop up as an eastern boundary for a number of things. There seems to be corresponding listings that use the Mississippi River as the eastern boundary for the Central US. So, I guess it seems reasonable, though I agree, it would be nice to have a similar boundary as ones referernced in the guides.
It seems like the message board post has garnered some attention and there appears to be some movement so maybe see where that goes. I was not aware though that New Brunswick had been "annexed" by the US but you know how Americans are with their geography.
Would it be possible to go back to the original goal of covering eastern North America? Since the project rules are set at the state level, it should be easy to add the seven provinces.
The Eastern US place has been corrected; no longer includes part of New Brunswick. We are no longer using it as a project boundary, but wanted to provide that information.
@dkaposi, I'm sorry, I totally missed your comment! Which provinces would you like to see included? I will definitely consider it, although we would probably need to work through a large backlog of observations to bring Canada up to the present.
I agree that the US/Canada boundary is not a caterpillar boundary and it makes sense to add those Canadian observations to the project. We would need a Project name change too!
Hi eraskin - no problem and I'm glad to hear that you are open to going back to the continental view. The provinces to add are Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador. In terms of workload, the province with the largest number of observations is Ontario with over 24,000 observations in Lepidoptera , and probably 10,000 in the other 6 provinces combined. Ontario is fairly active as I run two projects that collect butterfly and moth data for a couple of online atlas managed by the Toronto Entomologists' Association (the butterfly atlas is more than a decade old now and we have 317,000 butterfly observations mapped across the province).
In terms of data quality, the Ontario butterfly caterpillars should all be verified as they are actively reviewed as part of the atlas project, the moth project is newer and nobody has sifted through the old photos, so RG status is hit and miss with Ontario moths. I don't have any insight on the other provinces.
Alright, I'm going to move forward with this, changing the name of the project & adding the following provinces to the project rules: Manitoba (at some point I'll try to create a sub-place of Manitoba-east-of-the-100th-meridian), Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, & Newfoundland and Labrador. Should I also include the part of Mexico east of the 100th meridian?
I'll work on a journal post explaining the expansion of the project area, and create some custom search links so that we can start working through the past observations.
Yes on Nunavut, that was a bad oversight by me, but I suspect you are right in that there won't be that many observations. For consistency, I would support adding the part of Mexico east of the 100th.
If you don't mind, I would like to copy your post on the whistling caterpillars as well
Okay, I'll add Nunavut, and will work towards adding eastern Mexico.
You're welcome to copy the post about the whistling caterpillars.
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