Thanks! And sorry, I didn’t realize we had a single thread for these inquiries now.
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I think it’s more of a wiki/troubleshooting guide (“check these first”) than a thread to add new reports to.
I’m basing that on the end of the first post:
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This is happening more often I’m noticing. I took a photo of a cinquefoil growing in the cracks at the carwash and it’s coming up as casual too. How do I fix it when it defaults to captive?
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As far as I know, they won’t hard-code in any permanent fixes for particular taxa/places. You need to get more than 20% of the observations in that area to be (correctly) marked wild. So in the case of the mussels, there are 16 captive observations. Assuming no more captive observations are added, iNat will stop voting not wild once there are at least 5 wild mussel observations in the county. That is, if you add 4 more wild mussel observations, you’ll fix the problem.
The cinquefoil is a different issue because it wasn’t marked captive by the system, it was marked by another user. If you click on the number next to the down vote, you can see who and @mention them to ask why. The last time that happened to me, the user say it was an accidental click and they took away the down vote.
The only other potential fix I can suggest is to up-vote wild on your own observations when you post them in cases where you think they might be marked captive. So if you know a plant is usually cultivated in your area and most of the observations are captive, go ahead and vote wild when you upload it. With one wild vote from you and one captive vote from the system, your wild vote will win.
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I seem to have been able to fix it this time! Thanks!
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I’m beginning to feel this update wasn’t as helpful as I thought when it was originally explained to me. The 80% thing seemed like it would rarely become an issue, and the one time it happened was a fluke. Now, with the 4th observation in a week I’m being told that june bugs are casual observations too. Whoever is keeping all this weird crap captive in my province can stop lol. And this time it wasn’t a misclick like the weed at the car wash.
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Scratch that last post. Seems I’ve found 3-4 different ways to have your observation accidentally marked as casual this week. The 80% thing, someone misclicking, AND forgetting to post the location. Usually it reminds me that I’m posting something without a location, so posting my first mobile observation I didn’t realize that I could post without reminders of empty blanks. Now I know.
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Thanks for this detailed explanation! Very helpful for this newbie!
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Hi Tony,
thanks for this thread and provided info!
Till today i don’t remember to have seen obss. IDed at genus level to achieve research grade. Perhaps i didn’t get aware, or this got changed recently? I do not assume it was any bug, or what qualifies my obs. of this Parasitic Fungus to be research grade?
Erwin
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I don’t believe there have been any changes to this recently. Your observation has a community ID at the genus level and the community has voted that the ID cannot be improved, so that makes it research grade.
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Thanks Tony! I didn’t consider that “ID cannot be improved” had been voted and made it RG.
James who voted is right as the species needs valid publishing, thus ID can’t be more accurate at time.
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I’ve never seen that on my observations. Genus level confirmed does not result in research grade.
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You need to also check that the ID cannot be improved – in the Data Quality Assessment.
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When someone else marks your observation as casual with a data quality assessment resulting in your observation classified as casual is the observer notified?
My story:
I had an observation of bison scat marked casual because someone disagreed that the organism, in this case a bison, was wild. Since I took the photo within the boundaries of Badlands National Park I feel pretty confident it came from a wild bison. I either wasn’t notified or didn’t notice that the status had been changed. Since I use this observation in a presentation on how to teach food webs, I was nonplussed when I went to access it from the BNP species view page during a presentation only to find it missing.
Edited for accuracy.
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There is no notification for this currently, but that may be in the works eventually (see this page).
I had this same issue with bison in the Black Hills. I wonder if it’s someone who thinks that the reintroduced populations don’t count as wild (which is probably a valid argument, but up for debate). You can always click the number next to the thumbs down to see which user marked it as such. You can then mention them and ask why. (Sometimes I accidentally mark an observation as captive/cultivated in the Identify window when trying to select different photos.) In my case, someone else came along and up-voted it so I’d guess there’s a bit of community disagreement going on.
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Technically, no one can mark an observation as “casual”, there are actions that another user can take (eg vote “no” for “Organism is wild”) that change the data quality grade of the observation.
Currently no notifications are generated when this happens, but like @thomaseverest said, that should change when the notification system is revamped.
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Thank you @thomaseverest and @tiwane! And I edited my post above for accuracy per Tony’s comment.
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Handy trick. I’ll have to try it. Not extremely often but often enough I do come across observations which seem like they didn’t “reindex” after the most recent ID.
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What confuses me is that sometimes, a finer identification is supplied, but the tag does not change. For instance, an observation might have first been tagged “Flowering plants,” then another person comes and tags it as “Melastome family,” a third person also tags it as “Melastome family,” and then I come along. Maybe I tag it as a specific genus in the Melastome family – but the observation as a whole remains tagged as “Melastome family.”
Can you link one of these cases? There are a few different things that can explain this, but hard to tell in your case without seeing an example
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