On the Explore page or Identify, if you use the filter for only showing taxa at a rank higher than x, such as lrank=family, it only includes observations of taxa that have a rank.
I would expect that it would include taxa that are higher than the listed rank and Unknowns, since they’re sort of rank=0, the highest rank, right above “Life”.
personally, i don’t think this is a bug.
in my mind, items that have no rank because they have not been identified should not be returned by https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?identified=false&lrank=family (which they are not).
since state of life items have been identified and therefore have a rank, i would expect them to be returned by https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?exact_taxon_id=48460&lrank=family (which they are).
i think this is kind of analogous to comparing against null:
(none of these are true because null is null.)
Checked with devs and @pisum’s correct, one shouldn’t expect to see “unknown” observations if it’s working as designed. Whether that should be how it’s designed can be debated, but it’s not a bug so I’m going to close.