Species Complex Community Taxon being marked casual when as good as it can be

[jackgelinas]

Platform: Web, inat.ca

Browser, if a website issue: Chrome

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:

https://inaturalist.ca/observations/15597850

Screenshots of what you are seeing:

Description of problem:

When adding an ID to a species complex, I typically use the “as good as it can be” flag for the community taxon. This usually updates the observation to Research Grade (RG) status. However, I’ve recently noticed that some observations are instead changing to “Casual” status, and I’m unsure why the community taxon is still being considered imprecise.

Would appreciate any insight into what might be causing this behavior

Example where this worked as expected:

https://inaturalist.ca/observations/308728609

[edanko]

I’ve noticed it happens when the community taxon is still at genus level but I’ve added a species-complex level ID.

[jwidness]

This is the result of a change made a few weeks ago

@tiwane

We’ve updated the algorithm so that an observation will no longer be Research Grade if the observation taxon and the community taxon do not match.

However, this change is not being applied retroactively.

So the older observation you linked would also turn casual if it got reindexed (e.g. fave and unfave it, or vote on the DQA).

Note that you can see the issue this was trying to solve on that older observation – it only had 1 ID of complex, but it was being shared with GBIF at the complex level (where normally it takes at least 2 IDs for that to happen).

We’ve been closing the related bug reports and directing people to discuss on this topic, just to keep everything in one place: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/research-grade-with-only-one-id-at-that-rank/3270