I came across an observation recently that had a CV indication (the shield with the three “sparkles” around it) for a species-level ID not listed when I use CV. If I select “Suggest an Identification”, I get the correct genus (not the genus chosen by the observer) and two species-level IDs, one the correct species in the genus and the other a species in a third genus. In tests, I can’t generate a CV indication by uploading photos and choosing an option under “Compare” after first selecting a (wrong) genus. So, how might the CV indication have been generated for this observation?
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Without knowing any details my best guess would be that this species maybe had been in the CV before, but is not anymore. This can happen due to corrections being made causing the observation/photo number falling below the threshold for inclusion into the model
However, did you check on the species page whether it is recognized by the CV ?
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Both the correct and the incorrect species are in the CV model, and both are quite common (plants). The observation is also from today.
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Did you have it set to Observations, Visually Similar, or something else?
Edit: Just out of interest, I tried taking one of my observations, setting the Compare pane to show Visually Similar and telling it I wanted it to look within Frogs:
There’s no way that would have shown up in the regular ‘Select an identification’ dropdown, but it still has the CV indication when selected in the Compare pane using the CV (rather than local observations).
I see the same thing frequently. I’m not super familiar with how the CV works, but my guess has always been that the observer might have looked at the suggestions before entering all the associated information (eg. location). I don’t know whether CV puts any weight on location/date information, but if it does, and the observer looks at the suggestions prior to entering that information, they may see a different list of suggestions than we see after the information is entered. Like I said, it’s just a guess.
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Check on the observation sidebar and see if the observations are being submitted from one of the apps rather than the website. The website CV is updated monthly or so but it seems like for the apps it’s updated much less regularly.
Edit: Sorry, not sure how I missed this:
In this case it’s likely just because they used an app with a different model.
You can choose Expected Nearby (with location)
Or Visually Similar (ignores location, so that choice depends on your input)
Or Checklist
That’s a lovely example: plants as frogs.
Following your suggestion, I uploaded a photo from the original observation and specified the wrong genus as an initial ID. I then clicked Compare and chose Visually Similar. Selecting the same species that the observer did, I got the CV indication. If I set Compare to Observations, only one species showed in the list, and the CV indication did not appear. I seem to be going through one more step than you, though: if I first set a genus-level ID and then run Compare, I get the genus as a withdrawn ID. This isn’t the case in your example or the observation under discussion.
The observer used the iNaturalist Android App, which I am not familiar with. The two species here are not very visually similar, and I am uncertain whether CV would ever confuse them without misdirection.
Within Compare you can choose the taxon it’s looking at, regardless of the current ID. I don’t know what actually happened, but the observer could have achieved their result by (1) uploading without ID; (2) using Identify/Compare to run the CV (visually similar) AND set the taxon to something that would include their incorrect ID but exclude the correct ID (so could be genus or might be higher); and (3) selecting their ID from the suggestions. That would seem an odd workflow to me, but it would be possible.
(For what it’s worth, I do similar things at times when identifying if I want to use the CV and the suggestions make no sense or are very taxonomically scattered - if I’m fairly confident about the family, say, I might run the CV specifically on that family. Sometimes it helps, sometimes not. It can be particularly helpful if there are multiple things present, say an animal and a plant, and it doesn’t know which to go for.)
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Thanks for the explanation. I hadn’t noticed the ability to choose the taxon within Compare. But can you get directly to Compare in an observation with no ID? I found I needed to assign an ID before Compare was available. Then I had a withdrawn ID showing after Compare was run. The observer could delete the withdrawn ID, but it seems unlikely a new user would know how to do that.
I did notice the observer had a previous (correct) record of the “wrong species”, so it makes sense that they thought they knew the ID and took steps to apply it to this observation.
That question gave me pause for a minute, but a quick look showed that the answer is yes, it’s just only accessible from the Community Taxon section on the right rather than from individual IDs. However, I’m not sure many users would notice it. And given that they’re using the app, I don’t know what functionality it has anyway.
It’s also easily accessible from the Identify tab regardless of whether the observation has an ID already or not.
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