Error in geographic tree

  • When trying to add a new entry to the geographic tree (we add a “country” called “Southern Baltic Sea” belonging to continent “Europe”), during the addition of a collection object.

Hi @abhinav1992,

We can only provide answers for members of the Specify Collection Consortium. Since this question could be of use for consortium members, I have written a reply, but further questions and additional assistance to resolve this can only be provided if your institution becomes a member of the SCC.


This issue is that your tree has children with ranks that exist above their parent in the tree. See the error below:

AssertionError at /api/specify/geography ("Bad Tree Structure: Found 17 case(s) where node rank is not greater than it's parent

The IDs of all of these problematic records are shown in the response returned by Specify. You can query on the database for these IDs and manually correct the records so that the rank of the children are lower than their parents.

Once this is resolved, you can once again modify and create records in the Geography tree.