Attempting to commit taxon change leads to 404 Page Not Found error

Curators
,
1

[EDIT - no longer considered a bug, moved to Curators category]

Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): web site

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Firefox 84.0.1

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes/89068
[EDIT - taxon change now deleted, see discussion below and at https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/521779 for more context]

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):

Step 1: Attempt to commit the above atlased taxon split

Step 2: Commit fails, leads to “I got nuthin” (404 Not Found) page

Can’t see anything wrong with the split set-up, but maybe I’m missing something…

2

If you want to add subspecies, we just add them without any taxon changes and people can add refining IDs if they want.

A taxon change like this inactivates the input, which we wouldn’t want, and is probably why it’s breaking. I reactivated the input.

3

So it was set up like this:

INPUT:
C. arvensis (133740 - active)

OUTPUT:
C. arvensis pastorei (inactive, parented to C. arvensis 1197997 inactive)
C. arvensis arvensis (inactive, parented to C. arvensis 1197997 inactive)

I wonder if the problem was that I did not explicitly include the inactive parent (C. arvensis 1197997) as one of the output taxa?

Since the species has about 1000 observations, and the varieties are well-defined geographically, the hope was that doing a split would save the Castilleja expert some labor re-identifying them all.

6

We should probably add a validation where a taxon split can’t be committed if all output taxa are descendants of the input. Would that be the best course of action here? Would be great to find a way to make it clearer that taxon changes shouldn’t be used to refine IDs (e.g. species → ssp)

7

I mussed it all up, confusing things. During my comment I hadn’t realized until looking into it further that the output taxa actually had a different parent (inactive, https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/1197997-Castilleja-arvensis) than the input.

8

So if a species previously had no subspecies, and then geographic subspecies were subsequently named / described / recognized, that would not be a legitimate use of a taxon split? If so, I guess that wasn’t sufficiently clear to me before. Only “horizontal” splits and no “vertical” splits, so to speak?

9

correct - if a species was previously monotypic (e.g. no ssp) and then later on ssp A and ssp B were subsequently recognized, just add the new ssp descending from the parent species - no taxon change needed. The community will have to help push observations ID’d to species forward to ssp with new IDs

10

Ok, good to confirm, thanks.

Looks like there was some level of unintentional validation already, since my attempt at this split threw an error. But if it would have worked, had I included the new (inactive) parent species as an output taxon, then yes, some more intentional form of validation might be good. But as mentioned by

…so not quite sure how that would work.

I’ll go ahead and clean things up here and re-parent the new subspecies to the active species.

12

Apparently not a bug, so have moved this to the Curators category for posterity. Further discussion on this flag: https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/521779

13

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