Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.
Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website
App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):
Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Any
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&taxon_id=468494&view=species
AND
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&taxon_id=1185181&view=species
Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/): N/A
Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):
No steps necessary to explain this. There are two family-level taxa that contain the same lower level (genera/species) even though those lower-level taxa belong in only one of those two higher family-level taxa. Moth subfamily Cerurinae contains a set of genera and the species contained within those genera, the moth tribe Dicranurini (which belongs to a different subfamily) contains some of the same genera/species. For example, species Furcula borealis is classified as Ceruriane (432 observations at time writing) AND Dicranurini (252 observations). This seems to have happened due to a new taxon “Cerurinae” that was made earlier this year, but for whatever reason, some of the old observations of the taxa that were previously placed in Dicranurini were never moved to Cerurinae and remain classified as Dicranurini. I can “correct” individual observations by going back and agreeing with an old ID, which I guess gets re-cataloged by iNaturalist according to the current taxonomy. Is there a way to force those old observations into their current taxonomy? The genera in question are Furcula, Cerura, and Tecmessa – observations of these three genera are split up in Dicranurini (old classification) and Cerurinae (new classification).
I posted about this in the curators section back in February (https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/total-observations-discrepancy/20435) and I thought that it would eventually fix itself… but now I realize that what I though were self-corrections were just when old observations got ID’ed later, which brought said observations into the current iNat higher classification, and so this does in fact seem to be a bug.
NOTE: Dicranurini is not a tribe of Cerurinae, in reality nor in iNat classification, so that is not the issue.