I have a project that automatically collects observations made within Pennsylvania’s State Parks. There is a State Park Bio Blitz happening right now, so I have been watching the total observation count climb every day. Yesterday, I noted that my project was almost at 375,000 observations, so there was a chance that we might be able to pass 400,000 observations by the end of June. Today, it is at about 369,000 observations. I know that there could be several reasons for this:
Someone with many observations deleted their account (all of the top observers in the project still have accounts as of right now)
Someone with many observations removed them from the project (i.e. by switching their settings so that observations can only be added to projects by the observer manually / if they join the project)
Someone updated a State Park boundary on iNat and excluded observations from one or multiple locations (I am the only admin of my project, so the place list itself was not edited; I also checked several of the State Park iNat boundaries this morning, and although I found a few with errors, nothing major was off)
Maybe with the new “Unknown” ID update, Unknown observations are no longer counted in the project tally? (I doubt this is the case because I frequently check the Unknowns in the project, and there are not that many)
If anyone has any ideas about why this might have happened and how to check and know for sure, I would love to hear!
Could it be taxonomy? That two or more species were combined into a complex? (To be clear, I have no idea if this is how taxonomy works, I am just thinking what could effect such a change.)
Users can’t remove their observations from a collection project, and I still see a few dozen unknown observations showing up. Maybe staff will be able to get a better idea.
Given that the project that’s specifically tracking the observations from the Bio Blitz itself has already collected 6,444 at the time of writing this reply (PA State Parks 2026 Bio Blitz · iNaturalist), we should have more than 373,254 observations in the main project (even accounting for the two State Forests that are participating in the Bio Blitz this year which are not included in the places list for the main project).
In contrast, we have gained 95 species in the main project since the Bio Blitz began.
I suppose for taxa that are heavily observed within State Parks, such a change could impact numbers on this scale, but our most heavily observed taxa are relatively undisputed as far as I know: American toad, mayapple, skunk cabbage, Christmas fern, multiflora rose… all have less than 2000 observations each.
Yes, and in thinking about it, that should only effect species count, not number of observations. I am hopeful staff will be able to find an explanation.
This was almost certainly due to the https://www.inaturalist.org/places/jennings-environmental-education-center boundary being changed yesterday by me, via a miscommunication between myself and another state parks person. The KML they sent me was of a new parcel across the road, and not the entire park. I reverted the boundary back to its original state, but it may take up to a few hours for the observations to be reindexed in the boundary. I’m sorry for the scare!
