Autofill source for taxa?

Occasionally, when I type in a few characters and watch for the autofill name to pop up, the list sometimes has inactive or outdated taxa on top of the list. The screen capture below shows the result when trying to select “Schwarz’s Lichen Moth, Cisthene schwarziorum” with an abbreviated entry like “cis schw” or “cisth schw”.

The question is: Why would the drop-down list have an inactive, outdated subspecies name listed before the proper species binomial?

2 Likes

If I remember right I think the search result ordering is weighted in part by number of observations (C. tenuifascia has 5x the number of observations).

2 Likes

Yes. See https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/prioritize-scientific-name-over-synonym-and-names-in-other-languages-in-species-search/23191

The staff appear to be working on addressing this issue.

2 Likes