Conservation statuses seem to roll up to species

Reported this in the Google Groups just before the switch.

In my account settings, both my “Search Place” and “Names Place” are set to Ontario. The following observations search, with “threatened” checked, and place set to Ontario, returns observations of, among other things, Purple Pitcher Plant, Sarracenia purpurea :

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=6883&threatened&view=species&iconic_taxa=Plantae

https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/52651-Sarracenia-purpurea

Under “status” for the species, no status is shown globally, for Canada, or for Ontario. It is indeed a pretty common and widespread species across the province.

One of the subspecies of this species IS set as threatened globally (https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/182747-Sarracenia-purpurea-montana). But this shouldn’t be rolling up to the parent species, especially as that subspecies is not even found in Ontario.

If that’s not the explanation, then I can’t explain it at all. Everything else in that observations search seems to be valid.

Sarracenia purpurea is obscured in Vermont too. I’m not sure why. I could see possible collection concern, but it’s well known the sorts of habitat it lives in and many of those are frequently visited and in some cases even have trail descriptions and such mentioning the pitcher plants. I’m not convinced it should be globally obscured, but since i can actually possibly imagine collection pressure there unlike other obscured things I haven’t pushed on that one.

It isn’t obscured in Ontario, it just comes up as “threatened” when using that filter in observations.

The species is set to obscured with status N3 in the United States, so no mystery there. Different than what I’m reporting above, which is a bug I’m pretty sure.

ah i get it, makes sense.

I can see where this might be intended behavior. If a subspecies is threatened, but an observation is only identified at species level, the observation might or might not be of the threatened subspecies, and the system errs on the side of caution.

The (perhaps unintended) consequence of this is that all observations of that species need to get sorted out to the subspecies level before the threatened status will be reflected correctly on each observation.

I don’t think so - obscuring doesn’t work that way, nor is the rolled-up conservation status displayed on the observation. As far as I can tell it’s only on this observation filter where it works as I described.

Charlie, I am working on all the VT species now and updating the status and if obscured or not in cooperation with Aaron and Bob… But, For that species, it is N3 in USA and obscured for entire country. So no matter what I do for VT, it is obscured.

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Thanks, that is useful to know. I hope the number of species obscured doesn’t expand too much, but last time we went through that process there weren’t. And it’s great to get the statuses in.