I don't know whether this is actually a bug or not, but it an omission of a graphic on the planet build screen...
In my latest metaverse game (in which I was evil), I had not researched Soil Enhancement but I stole Habitat Improvement from the Drengin. The Altarians never researched any of the PQ enhancements. After taking over half the Altarians' worlds, I noticed that the orange border that would normally mark a Habitat Improvement tile was missing...the yellow Soil Enhancment and the red Terraformation tiles were visible though. I thought that was odd because I could select the tiles and build Habitat Improvement on them, at which point they would turn into normal green tiles. The only thing that was out of place was the absense of the orange tiles.
I have the debug.err and the savegame (Version 1.31), but I'm not sure whether I should post them or how. This didn't crash the game so I don't know how the debug.err would be of use...