Personally, this is yet another reason why I think this change in general was very poor in hindsight. When taxonomic splits are made by iNat’s authorities that we follow, like Clements, when we have species that are split, lumped, change genera, or some other type of change that alters the taxonomic tree where subspecies are involved, it’s always the subspecies that are set apart first into their new identity, but for sake of consistency I’m going to stick with species splits in this argument.
When the herring gull was split into four different species, major compromises had to happen because of the fact that there was well over 150,000 observations at least at the time of the split, which I remember was physically taxing on the iNaturalist servers that it had be committed by the staff themselves because they had to prepare the servers for that, and that it had to be done in as small of chunks as possible, which started with observations already identified to subspecies, which resulted in a temporary purge of Needs ID observations well in excess of tens of thousands, easily. This isn’t exclusive to species splits that have a lot of observations, but on the lower observed species level, too. When we split the cutthroat trout into four species, we started with all of the subspecies first, then proceeded to make splits based off of range after that, and the community fixed the rest where observations got pushed backed to genus.
The point is, subspecies taxons are always going to be the taxons that get split first when a species gets re-evaluated because it’s easier for site curators and staff to do the smaller chunks first, and while in the case above that I’m replying to here, I could easily withdraw and submit a new subspecies ID (which I am more than willing to do, if requested) but it is a completely unrealistic expectation for a subspecies identifier like myself to go back and meticulously resubmit all my subspecies IDs for Hairy woodpecker because it got moved to a different genus and the subspecies taxons were moved over first just so that those observations can finally qualify for Research Grade. I don’t have the time to do such a thing unless I get a notification for an observation like that (which even still, some get lost) and I do not have the patience, either, to sit down and fix all of them because of a taxon swap and a change on the site from a less broken system to a more broken system. It’s completely unfair for the observers in this type of scenario because their observation gets stuck in Needs ID unless someone agrees with the subspecies ID and it’s completely unfair to the identifiers, too, because it may force us to not use subspecies IDs when we can reasonably prove not only validity of the subspecies itself, but can prove that it is the subspecies that it’s identified to. It’s a lose-lose situation no matter how you spin it.
This is indeed a real problem now. I’ve noticed it today (I made a bug report a few minutes ago because I wasn’t aware this change was made) and checked for more. Looking specifically for these observations reveals that there are already quite a few that are stuck at “needs ID” for this reason.
I will add my voice to the chorus of concern here. I’ve seen it several times now where I’ve made something RG at (sub)genus, and then the observer has decided for whatever reason that they will have a go at species. They probably don’t understand that I’ve made their observation RG at (sub)genus, or why, or what that means - and they almost certainly have no idea that they’ve just made their own observation casual.
I understand the importance of ‘No it’s as good as it can be’ being discontinued if the ID is advanced beyond the rank where that was applied (I believe I’ve agitated for that myself in the past); but it should be returned to NeedsID, not made casual.
Description of problem:Multiple agreements to species level ID, some subspecies, and community taxon at species. But still showing as “needs ID”. The user has not opted out of community ID, and there are no disagreements on ID at this time.
This is not my Obs but I don’t see a reason this isn’t RG.
Step 1: I reloaded the obs on a separate tab.
Step 2: I closed all tabs (identify and obs) and reloaded them.
I hope this is the correct place for this. If not I can W/D
Looks RG to me. Maybe it was an indexing issue and someone reindexed it?
Oops now it’s Needs ID haha. I think it’s because the leading ID is a subspecies ID. It can’t be RG at subspecies with only one ID. And the way the system works it stays subspecies because that’s the first ID, even though it could theoretically be RG at species.
Do you think that if the user who ID’d it to sub sp. Re entered their ID now it would re-index it?
I’m not familiar with how the indexing works to a high degree.
I moved your post to this existing topic because it’s a result of the same issue. Reindexing won’t fix it, it’s caused by the subspecies now being the first ID on the observation. If the person who added the subspecies ID removes it and adds it again as the newest ID, that would fix it.
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.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/34882200 Herpetologist’s ID at Suborder + Good as can be, but with with a second ID to sp. Now Casual at sp. What is intended by the identifier ? Left a comment. No changes by me.