[Nhcoll-l] Google Earth fix?

[Douglas Yanega]

Hi, all.

As part of our normal routine for georeferencing legacy material, I and 
others here who work with specimen data capture use Google Earth. Much 
of this activity was curtailed during the pandemic, and we're just now 
getting back to some of this. It's come to my attention that - evidently 
- Google Earth no longer shows the boundaries of counties in the US.

State boundaries, yes, zip code boundaries, yes, but there used to be 
county boundaries and county names, and they appear to be entirely gone 
now. This promises to entail a significant addition to the time required 
for us to properly capture data, and in some cases will make assignment 
to county impossible, when a point maps along a road that crosses a 
county line (e.g., we need to data capture three points along Hwy 380 
between Bingham and Carrizozo, NM, and somewhere between those towns 
there is a county line between Socorro and Lincoln counties - but it's 
invisible). Yes, points mapping to a town or named place are generally 
fine, but points along roads often require a visual confirmation as to 
which side of a county line they are on, and that can't be done if 
Google Earth has permanently removed county lines from their display.

I'm sure we're not alone in having made extensive use of this feature, 
and wanting to have it back. Short of a massive letter-writing campaign 
to Google Earth admins, does anyone know a fix for this?

Thanks in advance,

-- 
Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82