PSA since the announcement is buried in another thread, with an UNintuitive title.
tiwane 2 October 2025 - Going forward, this will no longer happen. We’ve updated the algorithm so that an observation will no longer be Research Grade if the observation taxon and the community taxon do not match.
However, this change is not being applied retroactively. So if an observation was RG before today with a community taxon at species and an observation taxon at subspecies, it will remain that way unless it’s reindexed. Observations are reindexed when something gets added to or changed on them, such as a new ID, a DQA vote, a fave, etc. So reindexing an observation like the one described previously will make it Needs ID. I’ve done it for https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/40276969, which was mentioned in a post above.
You’ll also see a new line in the Data Quality Assessment:
Discussion has been focused on that thread https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/research-grade-with-only-one-id-at-that-rank/3270 so admin could close comments here? Please don’t Unlist - we need to be able to find it again - until there is an iNat blog post? Or a dedicated Forum post.
Or a tutorial for the vehement disagreements on both sides? I am glad to get subspecies at Needs ID, instead of jumping straight from ‘invisible’ to RG.
That original thread has links to 15 other Forum posts. A lively topic.