Native species in a project for introduced species

[blue_celery]

Platform: website

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?iconic_taxa=Plantae&page=17&place_id=any&project_id=aliem&subview=grid

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):
Cymbalaria muralis is currently listed as native in the place “Toscana”:
https://www.inaturalist.org/places/toscana#q=cymbalaria%2Bmuralis

Anyway it has been listed in this project that should include only introduced species:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?iconic_taxa=Plantae&page=17&place_id=any&project_id=aliem&subview=grid
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/aliem

[twainwright]

I think you have been caught by inconsistencies in the checklists for overlapping places. In this instance, the species is listed as “native” in Toscana
https://www.inaturalist.org/check_lists/15834-Toscana-Check-List?q=cymbalaria+muralis
but is listed as “introduced” in, for example, Lucca
https://www.inaturalist.org/check_lists/35955-Lucca-Check-List?q=cymbalaria

I don’t know how the software decides which place checklist to use for an individual observation. To be sure that the project works as expected, I would guess that someone would need to make the status consistent in all the checklists for places in the region covered by the project.

[blue_celery]

Thank you so much for the explanation. You have found the “bug”.

[jwidness]

More info:

@jdmore

Looks like if any spatially overlapping place (whether or not there is a parent-descendant relationship) has a species marked as Introduced, it will display Introduced for the first such place it finds for a relevant observation. When I go in and manually change the displayed place to Native or Unknown for the species, then it just finds the next spatially overlapping place with Introduced status for the species, and displays that for the observation instead.

In other words, for an observation to display anything other that Introduced status, none of the places that spatially overlap it can have Introduced status for that species, regardless of parent-descendant place relationships.

Makes logical sense with respect to how we define Introduced for a place. But it does mean that addition or removal of Introduced status on large places (currently possible by any user) can cause wild swings in the status displayed for large numbers of observations.

And it also means that any validation or error checking should be based on spatial intersection of place polygons, not on parent-descendant relationships, which involves a lot more computing resources.

[splendiddesolation]

I have stumbled on the same problem for Cymbalaria muralis https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/12647029#activity_identification_144030297 It should be native, and it is listed as introduced.

[blue_celery]

if you click on Cymbalaris muralis here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/places/la-spezia-liguria-ita#q=cymbalaria%2Bmuralis
https://www.inaturalist.org/places/la-spezia#q=cymbalaria%2Bmuralis
you can see that someone (or somehow automatically?) has set the introduced status for this taxon for the province of La Spezia and the city of La Spezia.

Then, it turns out that fixing the intruction status (native or introduced) for a given taxon is particularly time-consuming since one has to change it in every smallest administrative units and then in the larger ones (city->province->region).

We should ask to try to discover a way to solve this problem.