I’m skeptical of that, but wanted to check the source – maybe I’m wrong. However, I can’t find how to view the listing for the area in Alaska in which mallards are classified as introduced. I can find their status for the whole state, as “native,” but not the sub-geography. Does anyone know how to do that?
I may not understand how status updates are done, but it looks like the mallard Alaska status was just updated today:
You need to find the checklist for whichever place you are looking for. Then you can search for the species, and view/edit the establishment means. So the listing for Coastal Alaska Area is here: https://www.inaturalist.org/listed_taxa/89566309
Now the “updated by site admins” I think means it is an automatic listing, maybe cascaded from a higher place. Coastal Alaska Area is directly grafted to Oceania (which is odd), which also has the mallard as introduced: https://www.inaturalist.org/listed_taxa/7677635
Not sure where that may have cascaded from, though.
It looks like there is an identical Coastal Alaska Area grafted to North America. So that may be part of the issue. Usually situations like these are best addressed on flags.
Thank you both. I would have thought mallards would have been one of the most complex taxa that iNaturalist deals with in terms of # of listings of establishment (again, mallards = 1,469 listings), but it turns out that western honeybees (16,618 listings) and Asian lady beetles (16,650 listings) are more complex by an order of magnitude.
Thank you @thomaseverest for separately flagging the creator of the custom place in question – agreed that I should have tried a flag first. Hopefully it can be resolved soon. If such a rule could be created, it seems reasonable to require created places to be within the boundaries of parent places to avoid errors like this.
