Hello Ben, welcome to the forum!
It is possible to subscribe to a taxon from a certain place. On the homepage, there is a section called Subscriptions, where you can subscribe to any combination of Place and Taxon. You will then be able to see these observations in your dashboard under “Following”.
By default, you should only be getting notifications on your own observations and observations to which you have contributed a comment or an ID.
I don’t know of a way to turn off notifications that are from outside a specific area.
However, in your user settings you can choose whether to get email notifications for certain types of activity.
You can also “unfollow” any given observation manually.
edit: great timing y’all