Tracing the origin of irrelevant records in umbrella project

General
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I recently created an umbrella project to combine all bird-window collision monitoring projects.

After adding dozens and dozens of groups, there’s still a smattering of irrelevant records getting in, and it’s not obvious why. I expected to click on a record, see it’s accidentally been added to a bird-window collision project, and thus understand how it got in there. But that’s not what’s happening. These observations are not part of any of the collection projects that we added under the umbrella.

For example, this record
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/19422921
says that it’s only in one project, “Owls of the World”, which we naturally haven’t added to our umbrella.

Is there any way to figure out why it’s appearing in the umbrella group?

The patterns I can see in other such irrelevant records are lots of records from the Detroit/upper midwest/Great Lakes area, and lots of records from “Owls of the World”.

Does anyone have advice on how to track down why these observations are getting under the umbrella, and thereby help find a way to filter them out?

Thanks so much for any help with this aspect of quality control.

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p.s. Here’s a prior forum post that discusses some bugs in umbrella projects but I don’t think my issue is quite the same (apologies if the above is a repeat of a previously discussed issue). https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/umbrella-project-shown-on-observations-that-are-not-in-it/26208/9

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Here are a few more examples of undesirable records that I can’t figure out why they’re in our umbrella.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/33241340 (cormorant)
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/6679901 (chickadee on book)
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/14216705 (cape may warbler)
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/124768538 (snowy owl)

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On an individual observation, the collection and umbrella projects only display on the sidebar there if the observer has personally joined that project. So an observation could be in dozens or hundreds of projects and no projects will be displayed if that person hasn’t joined them.

Looks like this project is set to include birds that are alive or dead: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/windsor-ontario-bird-collisions

There are several other collection projects on the umbrella list that include birds annotated as alive. (A collection project isn’t appropriate for tracking bird collisions because there are no filters available to include only observations with that kind of data (e.g. a dead bird might be dead from something other than a window collision.)

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Didn’t realize that! So is it the case that my own observations might be in projects but I’m not aware of it? I’d rather be able to see which projects contain my observations, 'cause I might want to join the project! :grinning:

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This is the case. With some of my projects I try to notify some of the top contributors to let them know and that even if the are not entirely interested, having the project icon present in their observations may prove to be a helpful resource to others not so familiar with the subject of the project.

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Thank you so much @bouteloua , this makes a lot of sense. Thanks to help from co-admin Max, we’re getting this straightened up nicely.

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