I’d like to add a bit to this, as I’ve been learning more about how cascading conservation status works. I’ve realised it’s not just a time-saving tool, but people want to obscure observations identified at higher taxonomic levels, when most or all of the constituent species need obscuring. So my suggestion #3 would maybe not help much.
I suspect my suggestions #1 and #2 above are not viable, because the status is applied to the higher taxonomic level and there is no way to then prevent it from applying to all of the children.
So it might make more sense to address this through better visualisation of conservation status, as @kueda indicated on one of the flags. One option would be to separate taxon-specific conservation status listings from those inherited from higher taxa, into two separate lists. For example, “Conservation Status”, and then another section, “Conservation Status inherited from higher taxa”.
This would be easier to read, and would help in situations such as the following - a subspecies endemic to Hawai’i which has inherited a whole range of irrelevant conservation statuses from its parent species from other parts of the world. Only 4 of these 16 status entries are of any relevance to this subspecies, but it’s hard to pick out which when the list shows them all jumbled together:
