Given how long this thread has been active—and how many tricky edge cases it surfaces—we’ve written a separate blog post that explains our earlier attempt to fix the long-standing “Research Grade with only one ID at that rank” issue. The post also walks through best practices for navigating the situations that most often cause confusion, including:
-
how to use the “Based on the evidence…” DQA (and a few small changes we’ve made to it),
-
special order-related behaviors for subspecies and other infraspecific ranks, and
-
what happens when an observer opts out of the Community Taxon.
We also introduce new Identify-tool URL parameters that let you surface observations failing specific DQA metrics, which should make diagnosing and correcting these cases much easier.
While the edge cases can feel confusing, it’s worth noting that they affect only about 20,000 observations out of hundreds of millions. Still, we know these situations matter, and we appreciate everyone’s patience as we try to improve a complex, nuanced system without doing a full overhaul.
Thanks for bearing with us—and for all the thought and care you put into identifying and improving observations on iNat.