In the Data Quality Assessment, one vote of “No, it’s as good as it can be” in "Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved? " is enough to turn an observation casual. This vote is hidden away at the very bottom of the page and the observer is not notified when some…

Okay. I just tested it. I knew that this could be used to change a genus level ID into RG. I just voted “no” on an obs that was to family and too poor quality photo to further narrow down. It changed to casual. I see now how the one vote could be a problem. When something becomes casual it kind of “…

I may be in the minority here, but I would prefer that it be easier to use this feature, not harder (with caveats, see below). My knowledge base is strongest in birds, where I realize that this is less of a problem than with other taxa, but there are certain taxa where most observations are simply n…

I would like to leave it working like it is now on genus/species level, I want to have control over own observations without tagging people (as it would be with 2nd vote needed). And also voting “yes” can help with misidentified obs with many ids, when your id doesn’t change Community taxon, that wa…

This was noted as one of the things that will be included in the new notifications design update I think.

That’s what I hoped for after writing the post, it definitely will solve many problems!.)

Why do these observations become casual in the first place though?? To me, a casual observation is an observation ‘missing’ something - e.g. one without a location or date, or an observation of a captive organism, or one with no organism at all. The current ‘cutoff’ for this feature is at family, …

My, understanding, and I could be wrong, is that iNat doesn’t want to flood GBIF with tons of family, superfamily, order, etc. observations, so they’re marked casual instead of RG. The cutoff is somewhat arbitrary, but anyone can still use these observations, they just have to get them from iNat ra…

That sounds like a good reason, but I still have two problems with it: The number of observations like this is pretty small and I can’t see them having a huge impact on GBIF. There are more than 27 million RG observations which I assume are all sent to the GBIF, but if you look at Casual observa…

[image] matthew_connors: Surely these observations can be marked RG without them being sent to the GBIF That would require changing the way that Research Grade is defined. GBIF accepts all RG observations that meet the licensing requirements: [image]

Ah I see, thanks! The other point still stands though

Require 2 "No" votes in Can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved? to turn an observation casual.

Feature Requests

kiwifergus July 30, 2020, 11:17pm 33

@arboretum_amy I learn something new everyday, too!

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Why is this Observation Casual/Needs ID/Research Grade? - "Official" Topic General web	354	22127	July 22, 2026
Good as can be - is it? General confusing	60	1697	April 8, 2025
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Require 2 "No" votes in Can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved? to turn an observation casual.

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