ICYMI,
“AviList – a brand-new, unified global checklist of bird species and taxonomy – has been published today. Containing 11,131 species, 19,879 subspecies, 2,376 genera, 252 families and 46 orders, this new checklist brings together global thinking on what constitutes a species and shakes up our understanding of the avian world. […] The publication of AviList means that for the first time ever, we have a unified global checklist of the species of bird found on planet Earth.”
This must’ve taken a lot of work!
Next: fungi?
Now that would be a challenge given that the majority haven’t been discovered yet. I’d just be happy to have more publically avalible keys for plants and fungi, even a key to the genra level would be awesome.
Or even an offline build your own key I could take with me on my phone, the app trailsense almost has that feature but the default entries cannot be deleted and the tag system needs some work
I was skeptical that this would actually unite all the lists (since ornithologists are somewhat notorious for not being able to reach consensus on taxonomy), but looking at the story in BirdLife, it says the new list “will replace the International Ornithological Congress (IOC) and Clements lists”, which is awesome! It also says “BirdLife International will transition from our current list to AviList over the next few years.” So maybe this really will be a unified global checklist.
From the Birds of the World news announcement linked above:
“The working group of ornithologists and taxonomists behind AviList formed under the International Ornithologists’ Union, with a mission to reconcile the differences in scientific species names among the Clements, International Ornithological Congress, and BirdLife International checklists. The group met monthly to consider questions and classifications across a master list of well over 11,000 potential bird species—pondering and debating over a dizzying array of names, nuances, and spreadsheets.”
(Sorry zygy, this was supposed to be a response to noah_vale - misclicked).
I think it’ll be a shame if this totally replaces all other bird checklists – there’s really no visibility into what proposals they’re looking at, why they’re making the decisions they’re making, etc., like there is with the NACC/AOS checklist. Sometimes, the most educational and interesting part of the yearly NACC checklist update is the proposals they don’t accept. But the end goal is still something I’m happy about.
Apparently the Howard and Moore checklist folks have chosen not to join the unification: https://www.aviansystematics.org/current-concerns. This isn’t too surprising since they were the most conservative of all the global checklists. I don’t think many folks still use Howard and Moore, except for museums (which also tend to have conservative taxonomy).
Still in the works.
a) “A process for submission of proposals is being developed and will be shared here soon”
https://www.avilist.org/about/proposals/
b) https://www.avilist.org/about/committees/#TaxCom
" All TaxCom deliberations and votes are carried out and archived on a GitHub platform. AviList is committed to full transparency: we will make all TaxCom discussions and votes open to the public at some point in the near future by posting them on dedicated webpages, pending the resolution of multiple copyright issues. In the meantime, any person with an interest in a specific TaxCom decision is welcome to get in touch with us and request an anonymized version of the discussions and vote on a particular TaxCom case."
also heads up, I made a flag for this a few days ago, so anyone wanting to discuss this further in the context of iNat specifically, that’s the best place: https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/768247
Sorry, I should have been more clear that I was being sarcastic. FWIW I talked to a friend of mine who’s into mycology and if I remember correctly they think some sort of central database for fungi is probably 5-10 years off, and even then it would probably more about organizing at more coarse nodes than anything super detailed. But I digress, I don’t want to take this discussion off-topic.
Thank you, didn’t know this! The way Nate Swick talked about it on the ABA podcast made it sound like this wasn’t happening, but I think this info wasn’t known at the time (or he just didn’t know it.)
Yep, fungal taxonomy is basically a dumpster fire, but beautiful new things are growing up through the ashes. FWIW, most mycologists that I’ve asked about it say that iNaturalist actually has the most up-to-date fungal taxonomy of any online database, which is funny since iNat isn’t at all intended to be a taxonomic authority.
There’s definitely some odd decisions there, for example lumping 5 species of Purple Gallinule over 4 continents into 1 species! Lumping Eurasian Teal and Green-winged Teal and calling it GWT the drake looking very different to Eurasian and are separated by the Atlantic. Renaming Pacific Swift to Fork-tailed Swift for no particularly good reason.
It very much panders to eBird (American) unsurprisingly. A lot of it appears just lazy and eventually we will find all doves lumped as Common Dove and just one species of Duck, Goose, Eagle etc.
Worse the lumping of so many species may well affect the conservation of species, no longer considered a full species, going forward.
Big thumbs down from me.
I was surprised by this, so I downloaded the list to see for myself.
I see 5 extant species in the genus Porphyrio (including Purple Gallinule), plus 3 extinct species. So I think you’re simply mistaken here.
American Green-winged Teals have been considered a subspecies of the Eurasian Teal since ~2020, due to genetic studies showing they don’t differ much due to fairly regular (though still rare) interbreeding. The iNaturalist taxonomy agrees. As for common names, it looks like this checklist isn’t about that. I don’t believe it’s intended to standardize the English common name, only the taxonomy.
Apus pacificus - again, I think the common name column in this spreadsheet is just for convenience, the species has not been renamed. The Fork-tailed Swift was only split into 4 species (including the Pacific Swift) back in ~2011, so it isn’t surprising to see the old name still in use. Lots of people still alive used the older name for longer than the new names have existed, and old habits are hard to change. Note that this is the reverse of your problem with Green-winged vs. Eurasian Teal.
I visited Kenya a couple years ago and got the impression that Howard and Moore was the default among birders in south/east Africa. For example that’s what the BirdLasser app used for the Kenya Bird Map defaults to.
Apologies Jeremy, I said Gallinule but I meant Swamphen.
Western, African, Grey-headed, Philippine, Australasian, and Black-backed Swamphens, have been combined into a single, more broadly defined species, the Purple Swamphen (Porphyrio porphyrio).
OK, confusion resolved, I hope.
There was a molecular phylogenetic study which proposed the split of Porphyrio porphyrio into 6 species, but it looks like some taxonomies made the change and others didn’t. The comment in the AviList spreadsheet is:
The Porphyrio porphyrio complex is treated as a single polytypic species pending further research. Sometimes treated as six species based largely on mitochondrial-dominated DNA data (Sangster 1998; Garcia-R & Trewick 2015; Verry et al. 2023) that indicate deep divergences and paraphyly with respect to the two species of takahe, P. mantelli and P. hochstetteri. Available nuclear DNA data (Garcia-R & Trewick 2015) are mostly uninformative and mtDNA divergence times may be over-estimated. Further research incorporating denser sampling of nuclear DNA will be needed to determine species limits in this complex.
So, there is disagreement over this, and AviList has made the conservative choice to stay with the older species definition, while remaining open to change if further research leads to a new consensus.
I’m not completely clear on what the disagreement is about, but I know mitochondrial DNA is passed down from mother to children without recombination, and has less error-correction, so it can diverge in partially isolated populations despite the nuclear DNA remaining near-identical thanks to occasional inter-population breeding, especially if most of the interbreeding is due to vagrant males.
This first version of AviList is not intended to be authority on common names and all listed nmes are essentially placeholders until future versions cover common names.
This is true. Species delimitation should never be made based on mitochondrial DNA alone, especially in birds. It looks like the paper that split these into separate species in 1998 did so on the basis of two mitochondrial genes. The more recent study that includes nuclear genes (Garcia-R & Trewick 2015) reverted to treating them as subspecies and mentioned that “Pairwise differences among Australasian populations were higher for the mtDNA data than for the nuclear DNA gene.” That paper comes to the more conservative conclusion that “several subspecies and subspecies groups may represent species-level lineages.”
This is a common issue when dealing with closely related species or subspecies where interbreeding sometimes occurs. In these cases, mtDNA can give misleading results. Unfortunately, our over-simplified idea of “species” rarely corresponds cleanly with the genetic messiness of the real world. FWIW, it does look like there are morphological differences between these groups, but it was probably premature to elevate the subspecies of Porphyrio porphyrio to full species. Overall, I don’t see a problem with the decision of AviList in this case.
I imagine there will be yearly updates based on new information/data, much like how the Clements Checklist has regular updates. These are always interesting reading through, not just because it’s possible to get new lifers without extra effort, but it’s always fascinating to learn about the extensive research that is going on across countless species.
https://www.birds.cornell.edu/clementschecklist/introduction/updateindex/