Temporary content freeze during City Nature Challenge

News and Updates
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Hi everyone — similar to the last few years, we’re temporarily limiting a few processes during the City Nature Challenge to minimize disruptive events.

Starting on April 22 around 9am Pacific Time (see it in your timezone here), we will temporarily pause any changes to a few lesser-used types of content on iNaturalist that are more intensive. Most users will not notice these changes because they do not directly impact observations, identifications, comments, or projects. However, for anyone planning to use the features below, we want to give advance notice so you can plan and prepare accordingly.

These temporary limitations will be in place through May 4, which includes the observation period of the City Nature Challenge and a portion of the upload/identification period.

Taxon changes & ancestry edits paused (applicable for curators only)
No taxon changes or edits to taxon ancestry (including grafting taxa) can be implemented starting April 22. If you try to do this, you’ll get a message that such changes are temporarily unavailable. You can still draft taxon changes and save them to be committed after the restriction.

“Search external providers” disabled

If you enter a taxon name that can’t be found in iNaturalist, normally you can “Search external providers.” This feature will be temporarily disabled to prevent the addition of new taxa that cannot be curated during this time period (see above).

Large places cannot be created or edited

Any new or edited places must contain fewer than 10,000 observations and be smaller than roughly the size of the US state of West Virginia (~24,000 square miles or 62,361 square km). If you try to add or edit a place above these thresholds, it will give you a warning message.

All places added or edited during this time may experience extended times to reflect the edits or collect all of the observations. If you can delay adding or editing places, please do so.

Other activities that are not restricted but should be deferred if possible:

  • CSV uploads: If you are uploading a CSV of observations, expect considerable delays. Do not attempt the same upload more than once.

  • CSV data downloads: If you are trying to download a CSV of observations, expect considerable delays. Do not attempt the same download more than once.

Thank you all for your patience with these temporary restrictions!

21 Likes
Can't Withdraw 2 Specific Draft Taxon Swaps/Changes
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We usually announce the Nature Challenge there in the users/dashboard#sidebar, but now (april 15) is not letting us do it. Is it already disabled?
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Hey Carlos, nothing is paused or disabled yet — please feel free to share a screenshot of what you’re seeing so we can help troubleshoot! (In case it’s helpful, when I took a peek at announcements just now, it looks like your CNC one was successfully posted :slightly_smiling_face:)

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This CNC has resulted in an increased backlog of flags for taxonomic curators, which usually is a very small pool of regular volunteers dealing with the bulk. As far as i remember it was same issue in last years.

I would like to invite staff to engage with the volunteer curation community after CNC to work through some of this increased backlog. Over the last couple of years, i’ve seen almost no staff responses to taxonomic flags, some of which would really benefit from central guidance on general direction, update of curator guidelines or viewpoint on the how to align system infrastructure with user or curator desires. A first step however, i feel might be getting some more staff to just themselves try to implement what volunteer curators do for the iNat system on a daily basis, and continue to do when we are able.

Here, i’m talking about updates on the taxonomic scheme and many user requests for updates or alterations. Effective responses often benefit from some focal understanding of the taxa themselves, the intricacies of biological nomenclature, or both, etc. However, there’s a continual flow of user requests that are comparatively simple to implement, or quite easy to alter if the basics are implemented as requested then need update. Those are usually “please add this taxon” or more broadly “this paper revises the taxon”. I would be glad to highlight cases of requests where the basics are really quite simple and straightforward to implement, for example in lineages where there’s a single external authoritative database (and those are often already setup with link via taxon framework).

I heard promises at the start of the year about desire for better communication, so which staff would be willing to get their hands dirty on some practicalities of volunteer taxonomic curators have been doing for the system and community? Even a couple more staff members just applying a few minutes from each work day to add a couple of user-requested taxa would be a great step forward towards community-curator-staff engagement!

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Adding a missing sp has made this group of iNatters happy ! Grateful thanks to our hard-working volunteer curators.

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even cleaning up external taxa providers is a huge step.

I have found this code is responsible for “search external providers” for new taxon -

https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/lib/ratatosk/lib/ratatosk.rb

and I cant find exact failure reasons of that code currently it uses fixed and outdated COL2012 list, so dozens of my “please add this species X” flags are result of that code failing simply for relying on outdated list. I often see same taxon present in marinespecies database or even some species in COL list that that code is using too, but alas the platform doesnt show exact reasons of failures nor any logs except something like “not found” - empty response, making me recourse to curator flags for same.

so fixing it should be first priority for curators standpoint and it takes not more than an hour to revamp that code that is gonna save dozens of hours of combined curator effort. I believe the best solution is to fully move to https://www.checklistbank.org/about/API that COL recommends too.

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Indeed Diana, and always lovely to see such, often directly under key observations. Also worth thanks to those like yourself who are experienced community members just to ease others into how flagging works and such, or chasing up what’s still needed. So thank-you and others.

Else for

Absolutely, myself and others have been aware of that importable list being so outdated for quite a while now, i’d previously tried various routes to get the central powers to just relink some form of update, and i’ve used the word “absurdly outdated” in multiple places. The core being that there’s somewhere in the region of a million additional species names that are available through the current listing (without mention of COL’s extended version as still a big work in progress etc), then also not to mention a bulk of names where 14 years effort externally led to many recombinations, spelling fixes etc. All those should be importable by users via the existing framework, and updating that would ease an influentially large portion of the simplistic requests to volunteer curators.

I was aiming to put a long new forum post again on it, but was waiting until after CNC, so now it needs to be pushed again. I’ve got a diverse series of case studies bout how such an update (which sounded to me as conceptually simple) would then allow any users to add a multitude of names without reliance on curators (hence no delays etc), but also prevent users from importing and ton with since corrected historical errors, or outdated (old) combinations- both still repeatedly imported, despite there since being tons of fixes or updates externally on long-known taxonomic issues. If other system-wide basis of iNat infrastructure relies so fundamentally on such poor data from 14 years ago, then fear we’re all in major trouble!

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Good news to you, I have coded few hundred lines few days back and submitted it as pull request that can settle this issue, only after some staff takes time to modify and finalize it (I am not ruby coder per se and I havent written test cases, so I cant guarantee my code fix is 100% deployable today but its there at 80% progress as scaffold atleast)

here is my code to switch to COL recommended endpoint and latest COL 2026 list: https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/pull/4897 (files changed tab)

when finalized by staff or someone with changes, all those “Add new species X” request can be moved or atleast done by non-curators like me (and so will there be less requests of this “Add” in future if they can be added directly by users before such future flags) but only where there is a Valid record already on such taxonomic sources :)

Also consider this as genuine thank you to you, @thomaseverest and @typophyllum who has always added my “new species addition” flags :)

I believe all of these are scrutinized to best efforts on latest COL2026 atleast far superior than current COL2012 reliance.

but yes with iNat tree per se, I wanted to add two new features to my code above later:

  1. when users search a new species and it happens to be junior synonym that is not in inat tree, it should be autoadded and linked to proper senior valid name as synonym entry (my code above directly only adds the new valid-and-not-synonym species as ID in such case without offering reasoning on what happened to their search in first place) in tree.

  2. a locked branches in iNat tree auto-creates a new draft request if no draft requests available to that node. say Genus X is locked, and species xx is to be added in Genus X and if there are no open flags, xx search will auto-draft with all relevant from COL and create ready-filled flag or open auto-flag there.

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Really greatly appreciate that push on setup as really helpful to drive the direction forward. I’ll push things again from other angles soon if no change still over next few. Thanks!