Remove Ability to Apply Status to Descendant Places

Feature Requests
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Related to this thread: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/species-listed-as-introduced-when-they-are-not/5968

Curators currently have the ability to apply an establishment status to all descendant places, which will overwrite all existing statuses for that taxon.

If done incorrectly, this will modify a bunch of other statuses in a way that may be incorrect. Despite an obvious warning when trying to do so, this has caused issues several times. And it is not something that can be undone, even manually, without a record of what the previous statuses were.

The actual use cases for this ability seem to be extremely limited:

  • When setting all descendants as native, this is rarely correct - a species can be introduced to a descendant of a place where it is native. To do this responsibly, a curator really needs to be looking into all existing statuses of “introduced” in descendant places - at which point it isn’t going to save much time/effort anyways. At least for plants - this option does seem a little more reasonable for animals where introduced populations within/nearby the native range are much rarer.
  • When setting all descendants as introduced, this seems pretty unnecessary - all observations will display as introduced if any encompassing place is marked as introduced.

So open to discussion, but this option seems to cause more problems than it solves.

I think it should either be removed outright, or should only apply to statuses marked “unknown”, not any status. [There is text suggesting that this is how it currently works, but from testing this isn’t true - all statuses get overwritten].

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My understanding is that Introduced gets applied to descendant places with Unknown status without using that special tool – just automatically when the parent place gets changed to Introduced by anyone. And when the special curator tool is used, it will then change everything, not just the unknowns.

If continued, that automatic behavior needs to come with an error check, and the unknowns should not be changed to Introduced if any of the descendant places have native or endemic status for that taxon.

As for completely eliminating the special curator tool (apply establishment status to all descendant places), while I agree with your reasons, I still have mixed feelings. In the absence of better curation tools for establishment means, this will make it even more onerous than it already is to make legitimately needed changes (for which I have used the tool occasionally in the past).

Maybe we could disable the tool for now, and if/when a “Senior Curator” category is established, make it available to just that group, with some explicit education to go with?

If that is done, the tool should also be made smarter. Besides the error check mentioned above for applying Introduced status, applying Native status to descendant places should only affect existing Unknown statuses, and should throw an error if an Endemic status is encountered down the chain. Descendant Introduced status should be left alone.

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My understanding is that Introduced gets applied to descendant places with Unknown status without using that special tool – just automatically when the parent place gets changed to Introduced by anyone. And when the special curator tool is used, it will then change everything, not just the unknowns.

That makes a lot more sense to me and explains the situation better - I thought the previous problems had been caused by curators. But it sounds like it was normal users making a mistake.

So my alternate feature request would be:

  • Remove the functionality where changing a status to “introduced” will apply it to all descendant places. There shouldn’t be any cases where non-curators can make changes that are not easily fixable, even by a curator. I’m not sure there are any other examples of this currently.
  • Change the text for the warning. Currently it says

Are you sure? This will change the establishment means for ALL listed taxa belonging to places within this place. You could be undoing a lot of work.

Maybe it should be changed to something like:

Are you sure? This will change the establishment means for ALL listed taxa belonging to places within this place. You could be undoing a lot of work in a way that cannot be easily reversed. BEFORE using this option, you should be 100% sure that the status in question applies to every single descendant place. Note that a species can be native to a place, yet still be introduced in a descendant of that place. For example, House Finch is native to the United States, but introduced in New York.

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With some built-in validation checks like those noted above, that would work for me.

As far as I am concerned, it should never be possible for anyone (curator or not) to save a change to Introduced when any of the descendant places will remain set to Native or Endemic for that taxon. That creates a logical inconsistency in the system.

And really, setting something to Introduced when it will remain as Unknown in descendant places is logically inconsistent also (probably why that automatic behavior changing them to Introduced was implemented in the first place).

ADDED BOOKKEEPING NOTE: related feature request here
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/adding-species-to-checklist-should-cascade-up-the-geography-hierarchy/1838

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And really, setting something to Introduced when it will remain as Unknown in descendant places is logically inconsistent also

Yes, but I don’t think it really matters - the species will still show as introduced on observations

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Yep, just did a little testing on that. 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. (My test observation: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/27787778)

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. Ugh.

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Related changes I would recommend that are mentioned in the previous discussion:

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