I just ran into a nasty surprise. I was merging several redundant places for Frozen Head State Park (one with no boundaries, two with rough boundaries, and one with accurate boundaries), ultimately consolidating on this one: https://www.inaturalist.org/places/frozen-head-state-park-and-natural-area
Unfortunately, there is a collection project https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/biodiversity-of-frozen-head-state-park-and-natural-area which used one of the places with a less-accurate boundary to set its location. On merge, the location simply disappeared from the collection project! I would have expected it to update the collection project to use the place being merged into. I notified the project manager, but it’s alarming that this failed silently, so to speak.
I was able to replicate. Since collection projects were added to the Projects tab on place pages, I wondered if any collection project validation had also been added to merging. Turns out no, it is still possible for curators to accidentally delete places from projects when merging places.
Quick check: has this ever been addressed? Or will I still break collection projects if I consolidate places, in 2026? (There’s one particular merge that I’m somewhat itching to do, if it wasn’t for the projects).
Especially for larger places that may be used by more than 10 projects, maybe much more, it’s unlikely that the admins of all affected projects can be reached, and that they then actually update their projects. Automatic updating would solve this.
Merging is destructive though, a malicious or even just careless place merge can do irreversible damage.