So glad you posted this...I had sent multiple sightings to them because our county doesn't have any of my regular BF visitors listed. I emailed the site & they said to wait until they got their new site up to re-submit them...that was 4-6 months ago. I had submitted multiple sightings over a year ago to no avail!
Hopefully, this new site will update our counties now!

I like that you can see recent sightings but can I no longer look at a list of species for my own state? Where is my state with the counties in blue where a species had been verified? I used that a lot and I can't find it now. I hope they still have that feature.

They do have the list of species for a whole state, or individual county. It is called "Regional Species Checklists". They don't seem to show a state map with the counties with sightings in blue anymore. I do miss that feature because I could see at a glance if a species was common to the whole area but just not listed for my county yet. Trying to navigate around the Google map is kind of cumbersome. The site overall seems to navigate really slowly for me though even though I've got fast broadband.

Here is a link to the list for my state of Illinois
http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/checklists?species_type=All&tid=45

I sure miss the state map that showed counties in blue for reported sightings. That's mostly what I had gone on the website for. I have to say that I think taking that feature away was a bad move. I used to make up Excel files (any state) for people, to make it easier for them to see which butterflies they'd probably be able to attract to their yards, and I'd list them and their host plants. Now that the blue/white maps are gone, I will no longer do that because that has just become much harder and time consuming for me to do. Who wants to look down over lists for counties when it's so much simpler to glance at a map? I'm not one much for reading satellite maps, but I loved those maps that are no longer there. I wish there were a way that people could vote on this, but maybe I'm one of a few with this opinion of the maps.
Cathy

I did like the old maps better. I think they are doing Google maps instead because it is easier. I submitted some sightings and they now require you to submit the exact location by address or browsing on the maps. That saves the latitude and longitude with your sighting in their database. Then those sightings can be automatically populated on the Google map based on the lat/long.

There should be some automatic way for them to get the county from the lat/long data though and then show a simpler map with just the counties shown and pertinent ones highlighted. I don't know if Google Maps has that functionality built into it though, or if it would require custom programming. They obviously don't have a way to match the lat/long to a county name yet. When you submit a sighting you have to select the country, then the state, then the county....even though they already have the lat/long which is redundant. Perhaps that is something they are working on.

Another odd thing is that when I submitted my sightings there was no way to indicate what species your sighting is, or at least what you think it is. I thought it was an error, but after doing some Googling I found that is intentional. I read the reason is that they did not want to intimidate anyone and deter them from posting a sighting if they had no idea what species it was. My sightings are still pending, so I don't know how long the id process takes yet. At least they are on there though and show "pending". When I submitted last year before the new site was up I didn't even know if anyone had gotten my e-mail.

Update:

The four sightings I submitted back in mid January have just been verified and accepted. They're now listed in my county checklist. I was beginning to think it did not work, but I think they just have a bit of a backlog with the new site. They also now have a box to submit the species you think it is with your sighting. I don't think it is mandatory though if you don't know what species it is.

I would hope they would give priority to verifying sightings of new species for a given area to make those regional checklists comprehensive.

The site still loads kind of slowly for me, but it does work if you want to submit your sightings.

Thanks for the heads up reminder molanic. I had forgotten that they were reworking that site. Will go and check it out.

When I look at a checklist for butterflies in Missouri, the Ozark Swallowtail is no longer listed. I can still find it when I do a search. It's not listed for Arkansas either. Does anyone know why?

I am seeing it in the list for Missouri without selecting a specific county. It must be pretty rare though, the most recent sighting listed is from 1995? Maybe they are manually entering in older sightings from paper lists over time, which will add the rarer species to the checklists??

http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/checklists?species_type=All&tid=56

Ok that's just weird Molanic. I know it wasn't there when I looked. I tried looking at my county and at the whole state. I think when I put in my county or remove it, it looks like it's refreshing but it's not. You do have to click on "apply" like it says apparently. Thanks