All my Setophaga aestiva entry became Setophaga petechia

[upupa-epops]

@jnstuart

In the mean time. my Yellow Warblers are now all Mangrove Yellow as the switch-over happens. I see a few folks are trying to correct that with a Northern Yellow ID

Oh, this is because of this situation I think… The old IDs retain the same scientific name (S. petechia sensu lato) but the common name on them has been updated to reflect the new meaning (S. petechia sensu stricto), which confuses many observers and identifiers who aren’t carefully keeping track of all the changes and names involved.

@upupa-epops

If I understand you correctly, I think you can see a similar case with herring gulls where the recent split left many old observations with IDs of “European Herring Gull” which don’t match the identifiers’ original intentions of L. argentatus sensu lato (e.g. obs 1, obs 2). At the time, that ID had a broader meaning.

Explanation here:

@jdmore

@upupa-epops

Why isn’t a new daughter taxon created for every member of the split to keep the old (now inactive) IDs accurate to their intentions?

I agree that this would be ideal, but for practical reasons iNaturalist changed this about 4 years ago so that it was an option (not required) to retain the input taxon of a split as one of the output taxa. See this blog post for the full explanation (you have to scroll most of the way to the bottom to find it).

It’s unclear to me if that’s a recommended practice to reduce server load or if there’s another reason it’s being done this way.