Zoom in or out on a map by using the scroll wheel on your mouse. Alternatively, go to the "+ -" symbol (middle edge of the screen). Click "+" to zoom in, and "-" to zoom out.
To change the part of the map that is at the centre of your screen (i.e., to pan or drag the map), hold down the mouse button and move the cursor in the direction you want the map to move.
At the top right of the map, there is a button provided by Google Maps which make the map occupy your full screen, i.e, the menus occupying the top quarter of the screen will disappear. To make them reappear, click on this button again. Immediately below this button is the "pegman" or "street view" button. Drag and drop the pegman on to the part of the map where you would like to see a street-based photo of the area. This can be useful in finding suitable butterfly habitat in an area where you have never been -- or just to have fun looking at the picture of your house.
Click on any of the squares on the map to display the underlying observations or to see a graph of the species’ flight period. ( If nothing happens when you click, zoom in or out and click again.) If the species is "all species", clicking on a square will also display a link to the species list for that square and a contributor list for that square.
At the top left of the map you will see a picture of the butterfly species to which the currently-displayed map relates. Click on this picture to enlarge the picture and to access a link to more pictures of the same species on Rick Cavasin's "Butterflies of Ontario" site.
When you go to the atlas page, the default map displays 10 km squares where any butterfly has been found for any time period and by any observer. Use the drop-down menus to choose a particular species, a particular time period, or a particular observer.The type of the map can also be changed from 10K squares to counties, parks, zones or circles). Changing a selection in any of the drop-down menus causes a new map to be drawn.
The drop-down menu for "Time Period" has three choices. Choosing "2022 records only" will draw a map using only the observations for that year. Choosing "records added in 2022" will draw a map using all records added to iNaturalist, eButterfly etc. 2022, i.e.,the 2022 records plus any records added in 2022 which relate to previous years. Choosing "low year to high year" will draw a map using only observations from the year beside the red square in the menu to the year beside the green square in the menu. If those years have been left at the default values, this means the map will include only observations from 2005 to 2021.
Another way to see what's new in the atlas is to use the "Colouring by" menu and choose "new for 2022." This will display geographic areas (e.g., squares) in 3 colours: red means that the first record ever is in 2022; yellow means that there is a record for 2022, but it is not the first for that geographic area; and green means that the geographic area no records in 2022, but has records before that year.
Perhaps you want to notify a friend about a particular map. This is easy to do because each map has its own special link ("URL"). To see the URL for a particular map, click the button just above the map labelled "reload map; display map link in browser" ; then copy the contents of the URL bar and paste it in a message to your friend. Your friend can also paste this information in his or her browser's URL bar to go to that specific map in the atlas. A second purpose of this button is to reload a map which is displaying incorrectly, e.g., only the Google base map has loaded, without any butterfly data (squares, counties, etc.).
Just above the "reload" button is a line of information about the data currently beind displayed on the map -- specifically the number of records, the number of geographical areas (squares, counties, etc.) where that species has been found, and the earliest and latest years for which we have data. For example, when the map initially loads, this line may report something like "558,169 records in 3,431 squares from 1858 to 2022."