Last year, I tried to correct an erroneous “Introduced” status for Berberis aquifolium in Oregon, and was successful in changing its status from “Introduced” to “Native” on the checklists for United States (country), and Oregon (state). However, it is still marked as “Introduced” in all the Oregon counties, as well as in other states in its native range (noted recently in this Google Forum thread).
Is there any easy way to correct this for all checklists within the native range, or does one need to hand edit each checklist individually? If the latter, is there a way to identify all the checklists that have this problem? (The taxon page “status” tab only shows “100 of 431 listings” under “Establishment Means.”)
To correct the Oregon counties, you can navigate to the species under the Oregon checklist (this is reached via the “Places” link, but Oregon the state was actually on the second page when I typed Oregon into the “Find a place” box). When you enter the species into the search box, you will then look for “Establishment Means.” Click on “edit” which takes you to another screen - click on “Edit” again under Establishment means, and you should see a blue button labeled “Apply establishment means to descendant places.” This will fix all of the localities such as counties within Oregon.
Now for the rest of the US, the species is apparently native in Western states and introduced elsewhere, so various localities must be treated differently. There is really no way to handle this via bulk editing except at the state level.
Thanks @sanguinaria33 for the quick response, but when I try your instructions, all I get under “edit” is save or cancel buttons, no “Apply … to descendent places” (see screenshot). Maybe that’s something only curators can do???
Correct, only curators should see the “Apply establishment means to descendant places.” button. I would recommend flagging the taxon for curation and explaining what you think should be done.
@twainwright thanks for pointing that out. I didn’t realize the “descendant” button only appeared for curators. Also thanks for your work on delineating the native range.
I found a partial solution - a query identifying all Counties within a State that have a species on their checklists. For example, this can be done for Idaho (place_id=22) with this: https://www.inaturalist.org/places.json?taxon=berberis+aquifolium&per_page=200&ancestor_id=22&place_type=County
(ancestor_id is the upper-level place to search within, and per_page is needed because the default will give an incomplete list for states with many counties.) This doesn’t tell what the Establishment Means is, but at least provides a short list to look at.
