I’ve never noticed the “Observation Field” thing before. A user uploaded a large number of aquarium photos, identified therein as “Zoos & Aquaria”, but which were still showing up as Research Grade observations, as they had not been tagged as not being wild. The user had no idea this would be the case. This seems like a very unintuitive user interface issue.
So, obvious question, how many other observations are there like this? I can’t figure out any way to search for them.
Feature request: anything with that Zoos & Aquaria tag shouldn’t be research grade.
As far as I can tell observation fields are not taken into account anywhere important, they’re freeform stuff users can add for extra info only. They should absolutely still be marked captive.
Anyone can create an observation field - there are over ten thousand so far. They’re user-defined so their values aren’t directly used by the site in any way.
I support your request for integrating Observation Field and DQA functionality, but until/unless Observation Fields are more standardized, it’s a neverending task to check each new one for DQA applicability.