Description of need:
There are large projects with a large number of references to taxa. For example, red list projects. Some taxa periodically change their Latin name, while all observations with this taxon also switch automatically to the new name, but the link to the old taxon freezes in projects, which becomes inactive. As a result, all observations of the taxon disappear from the project. You have to change the links manually, which is very difficult when there are a lot of links in the project. But not all public projects have administrators who are ready to do this all the time, as a result, they lose their meaning.
Example. There is a project of the Red List of Russia with more than 800 references to taxa:
And we see that the project still has a link to the old ID, for which there are no observations. All observations of the Demoiselle Crane have disappeared from the red lists. It’s frustrating!
I imagine that one challenge in implementing this would be that there are different classes of taxonomic changes, and one would have to make assumptions about what all users want to happen in their projects when these changes occur. For example, if a taxon is split in two, do both resulting taxa end up in the project, or just one? If two species are joined into one, do former members of both end up in the project? If a project administrator, for example, wanted to include only species named after Georg Wilhelm Steller, and the name was changed to no longer honor him, would they still want to include that species? The variety of cases that might arise make it very difficult to know what automatic behaviors should be implemented.
No assumptions are required. The logic is simple. If a taxon has become inactive, and all observations have automatically switched to a new taxon, then the same thing should happen in the project. Who needs a link to an inactive taxon without observations?
