Why is the South African status twice, with different Conservation Status. Ostensibly I loaded both at the same time, which I did not.
It has been suggested that this is the “species” rank status, inherited to the subspecies. Why on earth do this?? If it is done, it should be clearly stated! How can there be two statuses at once? (i.e.NE and EN for South Africa)
I’ve encountered a lot of examples of inexplicable conservation statuses. E.g.,
hybrid taxa with a conservation rank, usually a “rare” status (S1, S2, S3), ostensibly from NatureServe, which is clearly wrong because NatureServe does not recognize conservation statuses for the majority of hybrid plants.
Taxa which have their national/subnational conservation status(es) “overwritten” by a conservation status from a custom place checklist uploaded with no citations or authoritative sources.
Taxa which “inherit” a conservation status from a subspecies which overwrites the species-level conservation status
I try to curate these as I find them but most have no clear explanation that I can see. For North American plants, NatureServe should be the primary authority on national/subnational conservation ranks.
@tonyrebelo can you please edit your post to make it a single bug report and file the other two separately? Otherwise it’s impossible to track the progress of each one.
@wdvanhem the next time you come across an incorrect status that you think is due to a bug rather than human error, please file a bug report and leave it un-fixed until someone can look at it.
This is not a bug so a feature request would be better. A status is applied to all descendants. This makes sense for extinct taxa and other situations, but I agree that it is not clearly marked and is not desirable in all situations. In this case, the species is NE but the subspecies is EN, and it displays both.
Previous discussion: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/should-subspecies-inherit-conservation-statuses-from-species/7436
I don’t think anyone on staff has really addressed the question of whether subspecies should inherit from species, but I’m assuming the argument is that in the vast majority of cases, a subspecies has a status that is at least as threatened as the species, so it makes sense to inherit/cascade.
I’ll leave this bug report open for the confusing display of the ancestor statuses (and I changed the title to reflect that). If you want a change to behavior of cascading statuses, please submit a feature request.
