i don’t see anything on that page that supports this. if i look at the Observations (1 week moving window) graph and expand it to display 1 year, it looks like all the lines have grown by more or less 25% from the beginning to the end.
if this is true over the long term, then it should reflect people working on older observations, since i’m not seeing the any significant changes in the ratio of research grade to verifiable observations when i compare to older snapshots.
if what you’re noticing is just short term, then i think it’s just a reflection of the typical seasonal fluctuations in identifier behavior.