Welcome to the forum, @jpage_cwf. I see from your iNaturalist profile that you’re one of the admins at iNaturalist.ca. Were you part of the talks with NatureServe Canada that started this process?
There are something like 490 curators on iNaturalist. @cmcheatle, who posted above, is possibly the single most active curator, and also happens to be a resident of Ontario.
iNaturalist did begin by importing conservation rankings and using them to initialize the obscuration-status of species, but that was a deliberately cautious start. Since 2015 (not sure that’s the right year) many of the S1 to S3 ranked species which have no reason to be obscured were unobscured, and several S4 and S5 species which are endangered by collection or disturbance of breeding areas have been obscured. Even though this task is not yet done, I think the curators are rightly concerned that much of their work might be wiped out by resetting obscuration to match conservation rankings, regardless of whether the conservation rankings are updated, since the provincial conservation rankings frankly don’t have much bearing on whether a species should be obscured or not.
Now, most of the CDCs have apparently been pretty good about reviewing the species in their jurisdictions to see which should or should not be obscured, but there have been some concerns raised about how obscuration/unobscuration is being done in Ontario. In addition to many species being senselessly obscured, some have apparently been senselessly unobscured. But the biggest problem right now is that there’s no communication happening. Until yesterday @allisonsw_nsc had only posted in this thread twice, more than a month apart, and she has been the only public contact with anyone on the NatureServe Canada side of things. Even a brief message or two along the lines of “We’re looking into what’s going on in Ontario” or “Ontario is reviewing the list of species but isn’t done yet” would have soothed a lot of fears. The ideal, though, would have been quick feedback from one or more of the iNaturalist curators who are also ONHIC employees (I know there are at least five such). A 10-day turnaround for messages passed through a bottleneck, with no public record of the inquiry or the response seems inefficient, at best.
Most of the concerns relate to commonly observed species being obscured. I estimate there are currently ~500 auto-obscured species with research grade observations in Ontario, compared to ~100 in British Columbia. That comes out to about 1 in 18 species obscured in Ontario vs. 1 in 50 obscured in BC. Reviewing obscured Ontario species in order of the number of observations affected would efficiently address about 2/3rds of the species mentioned in this thread, like Monarch (@dkaposi’s example, the most observed species in Ontario), many common birds (@reuvenm’s area of interest), and Red Spruce (@charlie’s goto example and the 13th most observed obscured species in Ontario).
I understand there are about ~10,000 species with a status in at least one province. iNaturalist users will not be immediately affected if species for which there are currently no observations in Ontario are auto-obscured, so setting them to auto-obscure and reviewing them as time permits should be fine.
The tricky bit is identifying species which have observations in Ontario, are not obscured, but should be. I’m not sure how that could be done efficiently, beyond relying on the expertise of ONHIC staff and of iNat users posting here to prioritize.