I regrafted this microspecies as a demo of how the microspecies compromise proposed in https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/535033 would look. Preferably at least give it some time for people to look at it before putting it back. Please discuss.

What feature is being demo'd in the second search?

For the first one, I'm not sure if it needs to change with the modified concept? It already returns things ID'd to section taraxacum, so in the modified form it would return things ID'd to section taraxacum and taraxacum officinale sensu lato, which could still be refined, as well as the infrahybrids. If you want only the microspecies you can filter your project observations down to only rank equals infrahybrid exactly in explore.

If you want to search everything except taraxacum officinale and taraxacum erythrospermum exactly, that would be accomplished by using the api search filter

without_direct_taxon_id=47602,79317

but unfortunately for some reason that filter currently only works in identify but not in explore. The full identify search for this would be something like https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?quality_grade=needs_id%2Ccasual%2Cresearch&place_id=97391&without_direct_taxon_id=47602%2C79317&taxon_id=47603

I tested the identify filter works as expected by adding a taraxacum subtile test observation https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/204926150 and that search does indeed return my test observation (you can find my test observation in the search more easily if you add &user_id=wildskyflower to the end of the search url)

Hmm. You are right that the species count tab in the explore page does not currently show any ranks below species. I feel like I remember a feature request to change this behavior but I am not finding it so maybe one should be made; it is true even for taxa like Trachemys scripta where the vast majority of observations are ID'd more specifically than species. The life list does work though, e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/lifelists/wildskyflower?view=tree&tree_mode=full_taxonomy&taxon_id=47602 shows Taraxacum subtile on my lifelist as a sub-taxa of Taraxacum officinale. Maybe @pisum knows a better way of getting a display of the information?

I think its kind of a minor issue anyway, because the sorting issue would only affect 265 observations and only 39 of those are research grade, and the amount of users affected is, essentially, just one active user IDs or posts the microspecies at all. Eliminating T. officinale without replacing it would affect a lot more users and observations in a more significant way.