Are you a curator with a bit of free time? There are a lot of unresolved flags on taxa . Helping resolve these flags is one of many ways you can help out on iNaturalist . Progress / Backlog Date [with additional space added here] Resolved taxon flags Avg taxon flags resolved per day Unresolved ta…

Ouch, worrisome trend for sure. Though I am impressed with the sheer number that have been resolved during those three months. A wonderfully relentless field season has kept me from pulling much of the weight recently, but fall and winter are coming… Thanks for the topic and heads-up for us all! …

I think one area where we could make a dent, if we could get consensus or a defined policy on how to deal with the situations is all the flags related to plant subspecies that POWO does not recognize. There are a significant number of these (and many more which are not, but could be flagged) in the…

[image] cmcheatle: I think one area where we could make a dent, if we could get consensus or a defined policy on how to deal with the situations is all the flags related to plant subspecies that POWO does not recognize. I don’t think there is going to be an easy guideline for this. Infraspeci…

[image] jdmore: One thing I sometimes wonder is how many of these might be in locked taxa with only one or two overwhelmed curators One clear issue, and I write this as a taxon curator, is you get no notification when something in a group that you curate is flagged. So unless you are actively…

[image] bouteloua: I don’t think there is going to be an easy guideline for this. Infraspecific taxa will need to be assessed on a case by case basis. Something as simple as ‘if there are no observations and no ID’s, and POWO lists it as a synonym, then align it to POWO’ would help give some …

Isn’t that already the policy? Sorry, I thought you were referring to missing infraspecific taxa in POWO (since their database has not seemed very complete below species).

No I’m talking about cases like this: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/556178-Styrax-faberi-formosanus POWO says that name is not valid, it specifically assigns it as a synonym of in this case the parent species. But someone, in this case apparently EOL where it has been imported from says no, tha…

[image] cmcheatle: To me that is a candidate to just get merged into alignment with POWO, especially as there are no id’s or observations. But I at least am unaware of any guidance that says that is acceptable to do. My impression is that it has been the unwritten practice to do this, but yea…

[image] cmcheatle: POWO says that name is not valid, it specifically assigns it as a synonym of in this case the parent species. But someone, in this case apparently EOL where it has been imported from says no, that is a valid name. It’s listed as a synonym on POWO , there are no controversial…

[image] bouteloua: transfers conservation statuses (which might do more harm than good), adds a usually pretty useless dashboard notification to anyone who’s made IDs of the output taxon or is subscribed to the taxon for another reason (e.g. it is on one of their personal lists), and the curato…

Big ol' backlog of taxon flags

Curators

bouteloua February 1, 2026, 4:08pm 17

fyi @sjl197 (re this topic): see updated table at the top - looks like it’s the first time since I started periodically tracking this that the number of unresolved taxon flags is going down rather than up

Topic		Replies	Views
Curators, would some more of you at least add some requested taxa? Curators	28	866	April 1, 2026
Reduction in flags Curators	10	891	April 23, 2025
ID advisory flags Curators	26	1135	October 15, 2025
New Taxon Flag Page - encourage source citations? Curators taxonomy	37	919	January 9, 2026
Curating taxonomy? Anyone there? Curators	16	1226	July 18, 2025

Big ol' backlog of taxon flags

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