I’m trying to correct a few of my observations that have a Quality Grade of Casual. Here are links to 3 of the observations:
I’ve read through all the items that can cause an observation to revert to Casual and I’ve checked these requirements against my observations. I can’t see anything that seems to be causing the Casual assessment.
Can anyone explain what I’m missing?
there’s a “as good as it can be” set of yes/no checkboxes at the bottom of these observations that’s affecting these particular observations.
If I click the “Yes” checkbox to indicate that the taxon can be improved, then the Causal grade changes to Need ID. But the Infraorder for my observation 44881400 is as far as the ID can go without a ventral image. Since the Infraorder is higher than Family, it seems like the iNat “Rules” want me to leave this observation as Casual. Is that correct? I thought my goal was to eliminate all Casual Quality Grades from my observations but now I’m thinking that is not the case. Some observations (like 44881400) are meant to be listed as Casual. Is this correct?
yes. correct.
Your goal is to make sure that none of your observations are Casual when they shouldn’t be. In some cases, that may be the best you can do, and that’s fine, as here. But it is worth checking that no observations have been made casual by mistake or due to insufficient knowledge.
i thought about this a little more, and i think there’s one sort of case where “as good as it can be” = yes will potentially cause unexpected issues.
there can be cases where the community ID is different from the observation ID. for example, if the observer starts the observation with a family level ID, and then an identifier comes along and adds a genus level ID, the observation ID will be the genus level ID, but the community ID will be the family level ID. if at this point someone sets “as good as it can be” = yes, then that will force the observation ID to the community ID, which is the family level ID, and since it’s a family level ID, the observation will go to casual status. that may not be the intended result though. it’s possible that the person who flips sets “as good as it can be” = yes intended to set the observation to research grade at the genus level and didn’t realize that the previous family level ID would make the observation casual at family level.
i think your first example in your original post had this sort of issue until someone who saw this thread helped to correct it.
