Agreeing with experts and "research grade"

[danaleeling]

@fogartyf

I feel like some of this discussion loses sight of the objective reality that:

A) the organism in an observation belongs to a single taxon at a given level (e.g., genus, species)

B) there either is or isn’t enough evidence in the photograph to correctly label that organism with the taxon it belongs to

As an expert in identification of Taxon A, I see no reason I shouldn’t be able to bump an observation up a taxonomic level (e.g., genus to species) if the answer to B is “there isn’t enough evidence”.

If experts don’t have that ability, then there is no ability for the community to override two users who over-identify an observation to species, even if 1000 observers add a non-disagreeing genus level ID. That would be a significant blow to the quality of the data in iNat.

(This is reply to a post in another topic but the post and reply are slightly off-topic for that topic which dealt with changing the wording on identification downgrading. I felt these two belong better here as the concern centers on expert users. If I am in error, please correct me!)

My apologies if I am misunderstanding, but once two other users disagree by identifying at the genus level and choosing the second option in the disagreement popup dialog box, the observation will “bump up” to genus and lose species level research grade status. And I see this process happening and playing out as I work through older observations. This takes time, and perhaps in this age we want instant answers. That said, in the plant world identifications can take years, with some of Charles Darwin’s collections apparently only now being identified. I know there is a desire to have single vote authority to reverse a misidentification, but iNaturalist is community science, citizen science, participatory. And with time, iNaturalist reaches consensus in a process akin to science: a community working towards agreement.