When viewing the profile for Phaeophyscia hirsuta, a small flag with “vulnerable globally” appears. However, the NatureServe link provided appears to show that it is not yet assessed either globally or in North America, although it is imperiled in Canada.
I was unable to find any mention of it being legally protected in North America (in fact, several publications from Google Scholar list it as abundant in their areas), but was able to find one paper confirming its Canadian imperilment.
Assuming this is indeed a bug, has anyone detected it previously in other taxa?
If you look on the Status tab of the species profile page, you will see the status desginations that are contributing to this situation. The flag that you are seeing is based on those statuses, regardless of whether they signify any legal protection. Because the NatureServe G3 designation is not geographically limited, it applies to all observations worldwide. This does appear to be out of sync with the information currently showing on NatureServe Explorer, but that could be a latency issue with updating Explorer.
If you feel that any of the current status designations are in error, the best thing to do is, directly on the taxon profile page, click on Curation, choose Flag For Curation, give a brief reason (like “Wrong conservation status”), then hit “Flag It!”. Then follow the link to your new flag at top of the page, and add a comment with more details and what you think should be changed.
Since the current display is behaving as designed, I am moving this to the General category instead of Bug Reports.