There are quite a few species in POWO that are “ungrafted”: in the database but not attached to a genus, sometimes because they’re pending evaluation for distinctness, and sometimes because POWO doesn’t recognize the genus that contains them and they have no name in the genus it does recognize. I used to be able to create taxon framework relationships to these taxa by leaving “Parent Name” in the External Taxa section blank, but when I attempt to do that now, I get an error message: “external taxa must have names and parent names”.
Was this part of the package that Scott rolled out to help manage the big sphaghetti-bowl taxonomic changes? It’s disrupted a certain amount of my work in ferns.
[amended–the number of taxa lacking relationships doesn’t seem to have increased by very much, so I don’t want to overplay the disruption, but it is a surprise, and I’m not quite sure how to fix the taxa that are affected.]
In cases like this, would it be appropriate to just assign the external taxon directly to the Family listed in POWO instead, as its “parent”? This creates an “Alternate Position” matching relationship, as happens when, for example, an internal taxon is grafted to a subgenus or section instead of directly to its genus (example here).
I’m not sure there’s a good solution for these in the current system other than leaving it without a TFR and flagging it – if you assign it with a different parent, it will “match” with iNat, but actually POWO hasn’t necessarily accepted it yet.