The whole genus, Coleus, is marked as inactive so descendant taxa are, presumably, inheriting that inactive status. I don’t think that Coleus should be inactive. In the 1960’s (?) Coleus was merged into Plectranthus and Solenostemon but more recent studies have reinstated Coleus. In fact many Australian species formerly Plectranthus are now regarded as Coleus by many authorities. POWO accepts Coleus (http://www.plantsoftheworldonline.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:20765-1) so I’m not sure why the genus is marked as inactive… best to flag it as @DianaStuder suggested (but, maybe even better to flag the genus). Edit: I’d reactivate Coleus right now, but am having trouble understanding why it’s marked as inactive in the first place. Best to flag it so that other curators can look…
That explains why I couldn’t find any of the synonyms on iNat while trying to ID a few Coleus observations this afternoon. Trying to find them now to fix…
The question now is what to do about all the existing P. scutellarioides observations because they’re still IDed as P. scutellarioides despite the taxon swap having already occurred. I assume they didn’t get moved because the destination taxon when the swap was made was inactive? I’m not sure what to do here. I could do another swap but don’t want to break things in a way that’s hard to fix so I’ve added a comment to an existing flag for P. scutellarioides (https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/482086#activity_comment_7dc5b4f7-5259-42e3-91bc-152a9499088e)
Not sure if this info will help but when I tried to ID a coleus plant this afternoon, iNat did not want to offer up anything when I typed Coleus, nor for Coleus blumei or Plectranthus scutellarioides, and it wants to turn Solenostemon scutellarioides, which is supposed to be another synonym, into Cuban Oregano Plectranthus amboinicus, which didn’t seem right to me.
@zdanko, the problem is that there are 698 observations for https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/291284-Plectranthus-scutellarioides which has the wrong parent (and is therefore an inactive taxon). I think a swap is ok but I’m not sure because the swap to C. scutellarioides had already been done (but with the destination taxon having the wrong Coleus parent)
No problem, thanks @zdanko. There’s no rush for the swap so I’ll wait to see if there’s input on the flag. I doubt the swap would break things but I’ve never seen observations in an inactive taxon before so it’s making me nervous lol
It seems there are actually 9829 observations - I assume most of them are casual because this is a popular house plant and a lot of them are cultivated.
Also, I made a flag on the Plectranthus amboinicus page to note the misdirection that now occurs when putting in the synonym Solenostemon scutellarioides for Coleus scutellarioides.
Another thing that seems to be in limbo right now: I notice that a lot of synonyms and common names in other languages (e.g. German) now go nowhere. Will this automatically fix itself when the Plectranthus scutellaroides swap is completed, or do these all have to be added manually to the new taxon?
Just a reminder that this is still in limbo - there are 9,883 observations ID’d with the now inactive taxon Plectranthus scutellarioides, some apparently recently ID’d using computer vision - not sure how that even works with an inactive taxon.