It could have been the other way around if global positioning systems were either not developed or used only by the military. In that case, detecting scenery of a park could be easier than trying to figure out the position on the map.

Or it could just be that maps data are not shared. You'll need to hire boats and hire people to go and draw the map.

That's true, even if the specific example doesn't hold, the core concept does. If I needed to implement a bird detector today, I'd make an API call to AWS Rekognition or an equivalent service. It would take me a day or two to learn the API and then maybe 4 hours to actually implement. But if you asked me to implement a bird species detector, I'm pretty sure there is no off the shelf API capable of that, and I would indeed need months or years.