If your area of interest (AOI) polygon shifts or appears in the wrong location over satellite imagery after uploading a shapefile to Planet's Tasking Dashboard (TaDa), you are likely encountering a Coordinate Reference System (CRS) mismatch.
Why Is This Happening?
Tasking Dashboard requires all vector shapefile uploads to use EPSG:4326 (WGS 84). If you upload a zip file containing a shapefile defined in a different projection—such as Double_Stereographic or local state plane systems—the platform may read the raw coordinate numbers without transforming them to latitude and longitude correctly. This causes the geometry to drift, producing a noticeable spatial offset between your polygon and the background basemap.
Tasking Dashboard currently requires EPSG:4326 (WGS 84). Always reproject your shapefiles to EPSG:4326 prior to packaging and uploading.
How to Fix It?
To correct the issue, re-export your shapefile using QGIS or a geospatial library to force the coordinate system to WGS 84. The following steps outline how to do this in QGIS.
- Right-click your original layer in the Layers panel on the left.
- Hover over Export and click Save Features As...
- Set the Format to ESRI Shapefile.
- Click the File name ... button to choose where to save the file and what to name it.
- In the CRS dropdown, select EPSG:4326 - WGS 84 (if it's not in the dropdown, click the globe icon next to it to search for it).
- Leave the rest as default and click OK.
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