Ugh. I was afraid that something like that was happening. Definitely looks like a feature request or two is needed to me. I’m really hoping to get some comments from staff to confirm this. That might help us specify exactly what we’d like to change in a feature request. @tiwane would you mind taking a look at this?
It does, but unless the system is changed, I would personally rather have this ability removed or severely limited (though, if your latest statement is true, it may not even matter). Having a species marked as invasive does functionally apply it down the place hierarchy even if the actual status for the individual places is left unchanged.
Ultimately though, I think the best fix would be as follows:
If a native status is applied to a low rung on the hierarchy and an invasive status is applied at a higher rung, the system should automatically detect the conflict, NOT change the status of places, treat it as an unknown rank to observations (i.e., no pink “!” and no green “N” when viewing thumbnails), and somehow flag it for curation.
I feel this would significantly help the problem. That in addition to stopping the automatic application of status to descendent places, the ability to apply changes up the hierarchy, and make changes only available to curators if it’s not already the case should serve as a good fix. If even only some of these were accomplished, keeping the apply to descendent places option would be much easier to work around even when misapplied.
The reason I’m still worried about applying to descendent places, is that I’m not sure how difficult these are to develop and how long it will be before these changes can be enacted. It kind of worries me that we have the ability to do this and ending up with such a roadblock to correcting the problem. When something is marked as invasive, the first thought that comes to my mind when I see that something is invasive is to eliminate on sight. I’m certainly not the only one and I really don’t like the idea of people ripping out natives based on the misinformation they got here.