Newly Renamed Prokaryote Phyla Cause Uproar
- Oren & Garrity 2021 Valid publication of the names of forty-two phyla of prokaryotes
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But Lloyd argues that the risks of a massive nomenclature update extend beyond annoyance over increasingly “obscured names.” Microbes that are important to disease research, infrastructure maintenance, food safety, and other real-world applications now have different names than what’s written in the vast bodies of work describing them, potentially causing safety hazards, she says.
I think this point really highlights one of the big strengths of iNat over more traditional repositories of biodiversity data, e.g. museum collections; all the names can be swapped over very easily and be applied to all observations/places on the platform straight away.
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That should be true of all digital record keeping methods.
The mix of various legacy systems ranging from paper to stored research papers to offline digital to cloud makes a mess of things though.
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Interesting change. Don’t fully understand the rationale though.
In zoology (ICZN), any rank above the family-level (i.e. order, class, phylum) is not governed by the code (so even more ranks than were previously not covered by the ICSP). While standardization is great, the main goal of a nomenclatural code is to maintain stability of names. In the case of animals, most order, class, and phylum names have been accepted and in use for centuries (only in a few cases is there some inconsistency in usage). To change these so that they can have standardized endings and be formed from a type genus would be highly disruptive for rather dubious value IMO.
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Kind of reminds me of the the controversy around the classification of Acacia.
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