I am not a biologist, just a normal person who enjoys nature and using the iNaturalist app to track my sightings. I have no clue what these notifications are about or why I get them. I assumed that they had something to do with my IDs, but when I click on “View your affected IDs” it never shows me anything. Not once has it ever shown many any of my IDs that were affected by these changes.
Can someone please explain what these notifications mean and why I am getting them if they have nothing to do with my profile?
The taxonomic hierarchy and structure are constantly developing and changing, so when the database of the one used by iNat is updated with the changes, it’s when you get these PSAs. At least that’s how I’ve figured it. They have never affected me in any way, so I’d say don’t worry yourself with them.
Although it doesn’t seem to have been implemented exactly as I expected. It only shows IDs that were updated (which makes sense given the button), but the notifications are triggered on observations you follow that have an updated ID or are part of a group that was changed, even if it wasn’t your ID that was updated. You have observations that used to be in Hylinae but are now in Hylidae, so you got the notification, even though your IDs weren’t updated and there weren’t even any IDs of Hylinae on your observations.
I’ve considered making another request to address this, but haven’t gotten around to it.
These are just rearrangements of higher-level taxa (based on new studies) that probably don’t affect your species-level observations so you won’t see a change in your observations. Subfamily elevated to family, in this case.
If you need a simpler explanation: the scientific name has been revised and therefore appears changed. No action needed on your part. (Or it might be the family, etc; anyway you can ignore.)
Thanks. It is not a big deal to me, I am just kind of OCD when it comes to understanding why I got a notification. If when I clicked on “View your affected IDs”, it actually showed me IDs that were affected, I would be fine, even if I did not understand the What or Why of the change. It is when I get notifications that appear to have nothing to do with me, that make zero sens why I got the notification, that it triggers my OCD to understand why I even got the notification. Call it the “Unsolved Mystery” OCD trigger if you want.
It used to be in the subfamily Hylinae, but that subfamily now doesn’t exist, and your frog is in the family Hylidae instead. Nothing on the observation page has changed, because the frog’s genus and species are unchanged. So the notification is just there to tell you that the frogs’ family name has changed. If you’d never observed any frogs in this group, you’d not have gotten the notification.
I got one of those notices. The affected observation is this: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/292823296 . It has three IDs, one as Anura and two to species, but no ID as Hylidae or Hylinae, so there’s no note on the observation that an ID has been changed.
I got another notice about Fortiblatta, which I observed e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/321194766 . I had flagged the genus after finding on Wikipedia that it’s a junior homonym of an extinct genus. Since the taxon swap resulted in changing the species name, and it was identified to species, there is an ID update in the observation.
