I was using the "MapCompare" tool the other day, and noticed that when filtering to Canada / British Columbia / Greater Vancouver, the results included geocaches in the vicinity of Sechelt, Lund, and Powell River:
Indeed, inspecting the Maps generated by “ProfileStats” reveals that some regions are considered to be part of Greater Vancouver (note the colour):
Inspecting the Regional District polygons offered by OpenStreetMap (note: “Powell River Regional District” was renamed to “qathet Regional District” in 2018. Project-GC still appears to use the former name), it starts to become obvious what has happened:
I believe that this occurs because there are indigenous/First Nations land enclaves within these Regional Districts. Due to this, the system has chosen (either intentionally or possibly due to a bug) to geocode caches located within these enclaves to “Greater Vancouver”, despite the fact that these enclaves are independent from county administration.
Using OpenStreetMap’s “query features” functionality within one of these enclaves does correctly confirm that this is indigenous land, not part of any county:
Compare this to a query within the Regional District:
I see three possible scenarios here:
- Project-GC has intentionally chosen to place these enclaves with Greater Vancouver, for reasons that are not published (or that I cannot find.)
- Assuming that Project-GC is sourcing its county data from OpenStreetMap, it may be a logic error in the geocoding machinery.
- However, this question from 2017 (which is still relevant) suggests that Canada's county data is sourced from Statistics Canada, in which case this may be an issue with the polygons provided by Statistics Canada.
For now, I have placed this question under "Support and help", assuming (1).
In the case of (2) or (3), there are two possible ideas that come to mind.
- Group these enclaves with the enclosing Regional District.
- Create a new "county" for British Columbia called "Aboriginal Lands" which includes all of these enclaves. (That said, Geocaching is generally not permitted in indigenous lands so the first option is likely better.)