A common issue brought up on the forum is an observation which looks like it meets the criteria for a certain data quality grade (i.e. Casual, Needs ID, or Research Grade), but iNaturalist does not label the observation as having that grade. While this is sometimes caused by a software bug, it is us…

[image] jwidness: “The system will vote that the observation is not wild/naturalized if there are at least 10 other observations of a genus or lower in the smallest county-, state-, or country-equivalent place that contains this observation and 80% or more of those observations have been marked …

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/12137608 https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/512816 I can’t explain this one. Tried reindexing, didn’t work. Suspecting the old dates (3 years on the first disagree) have something to do with it?

see related bug report: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/observation-with-four-identical-identifications-labeled-as-needs-id/18416

Is there something specifically tricky about molluscs that underwent taxon swap? The redindexing trick of altering the DQA doesn’t work on these two: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/18443915 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/39641789

Yes, and normally the fix for the known bug is to change something about the DQA (personally I upvote “evidence of organism” because that’s pretty harmless) and this will cause the observation to “reindex”/ refresh and fix the bug. However that trick doesn’t work on these two molluscs and I’m not su…

[image] arboretum_amy: Is there something specifically tricky about molluscs that underwent taxon swap? The redindexing trick of altering the DQA doesn’t work on these two: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/18443915 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/39641789 I typed in the spe…

The new weird one I found today seems to be causal because the observer marked their own image as spam (probably a mistake, as it seems like a real image to me.) I don’t think there’s any way for me to fix that since I’m not a curator.

Feel free to tag me on those :)

Why is this Observation Casual/Needs ID/Research Grade? - "Official" Topic

General

jwidness December 11, 2020, 4:19am 66

There’s a known bug, you can see some previous discussion here and here.

Topic		Replies	Views
Require 2 "No" votes in Can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved? to turn an observation casual. Feature Requests	32	1421	July 30, 2020
Research Grade with only one ID at that rank Bug Reports	123	5027	January 15, 2026
Why are Two agreeing IDs (and no disagreeing IDs) needed to achieve research grade? General question	49	1243	February 3, 2025
Why does "Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved?" exist on the Data Quality Assessment? General question	25	723	January 2, 2025
I think that observations ID'ed to the family level should be considered for research grade General	37	2008	February 22, 2024

Why is this Observation Casual/Needs ID/Research Grade? - "Official" Topic

Related topics