In what looks like a similar case to this one for Orchidaceae (https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/608886), it appears that bulk conservation status for Sweden was added in May 2021 to many (all?) species in this genus, including many species not found at all in Europe - for example Cypripedium acaule, Cypripedium parviflorum, Cypripedium montanum and others.

This case seems less bad than the Queensland case, as it doesn't appear to have over-ridden lots of previous work to set open/obscure status for species, but nevertheless we should avoid adding conservation status for species that don't occur in a jurisdiction. Better to add status only to a list of species known to occur there, and not to all members worldwide of a genus.

In this case, the only species of this genus so far recorded in Sweden is Cypripedium calceolus and only four species or hybrids of this genus have been recorded in the whole of Europe on iNat, so adding conservation status one-by-one for Sweden would not be onerous.

I would suggest that the bulk import of conservation status to all/most Cypripedium be reversed, if possible.

@cynips @tiwane @loarie @kueda

That change is helpful, thank you, Ken-ichi, but I would suggest that it's not enough. The issue here is not that observations have been obscured (the status added in this case was with open geoprivacy, and anyway will not take effect on the species affected, which are not found in the jurisdiction) but that it doesn't make much sense to clutter up the conservation status section of 40+ species of orchids with a status for Sweden when only one of those species actually occurs in Sweden. Why should an orchid endemic to Taiwan be given a conservation status listing from a European country? It's redundant and inaccurate, and it will make it increasingly difficult to find relevant information in the section on conservation status.

It's doubly redundant because the only relevant species Cypripedium calceolus already has a conservation status entered at species level, so all this bulk run has done is add a duplicate status - this can only lead to confusion when someone updates one in the future and not the other.

Even if the Swedish law has decided to protect all species in the genus, the clear implication is that this applies only to species that could plausibly occur in the wild in Sweden, not species that only grow on the other side of the world. These statuses should have been added only for such species.

Yes, that's my main objection here (on the Queensland issue, there are other issues too, with the bulk upload resulting in lots of multiple status entries). I've submitted a feature request. Thanks!

Thank you, Carrie!

@cynips a curator must have edited the conservation status to open since it was added in 2021. That must have happened before February 2022, which is when we introduced taxon histories to record such changes.

Yeah, ok, getting clearer now. I see that my export included "Ingen hotstatus angiven" (=no threat status given) for both the genus and the species. These are national Swedish statuses and shouldn't be applied elsewhere, of course.

Makes sense to get a notification of a subsequent change. And good that there is now a history of changes being recorded.

Could it be that a blank is interpreted as Open, simply?

We're currently updating our list of sensitive species in Sweden, mostly removing some since it is usually better that observations are open so that people can be careful with the place where the observation was made. In any case, I'll wait for how this progresses and the new list before making any changes.