Checking the "No, it's as good as it can be" box causes observations with mixed genus and species level CID to become casual

General
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I recently noticed that an observation of mine was marked casual, and couldn’t figure out why. It had three ID’s, two at genus level and then recently a third at species level. I had marked it as “No, it’s as good as it can be” when it was at the genus level, assuming that without flowers it would be impossible to separate from similar species. I have not opted out of the community taxon.

When the new ID was added, it caused the observation to go from Research Grade at genus level to Casual, at the species level. You should be able to recreate the issue here, by toggling the “No, it’s as good as it can be” button in the DQA: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/249078277

In the past observations like this would go from Research Grade at the genus level to Research Grade at the species level when a refining ID was made, and I recall there being some discussion about whether that was ideal.

Is this a bug, or a new “feature”?

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Hi David, yes, a change was made such that if the community votes the community taxon cannot be improved, and the community taxon and observation taxon do not match, the observation will become casual grade. This was implemented to solve some problems but introduced others. See this open topic about the recent change: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/research-grade-with-only-one-id-at-that-rank/3270/51

In this case, the community taxon is genus (Veronica) and the observation taxon is species (Veronca persica). If you do think the community taxon can be improved to species level, then you should not vote that it cannot be improved. If you disagree with the species ID, you should add a disagreeing genus ID.

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I’ll note that we’re working on ways to mitigate this issue.

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