Create a taxon and ancestry changes page

Feature Requests
1

Platform(s): Website

Description of need:
It is not easy to keep track of taxon (ID, genus or species) and ancestry (whole taxonomic arrangement) changes. The first usually results in a notification, if it affects any of your observations, but the second just slips through the cracks.

I believe it would be usefull to have a page on the website where you could check all taxonomic changes (at any level) that occur on iNaturalist. This would be very useful when keeping up to date taxonomic arrangement of a personal archive, keeping each observer updated on the current taxonomy or even informing users of the reasons behind each taxonomic change.

Feature request details:
The baseline of the idea is to create a page on the website where one could check for any or all taxonomic changes implemented on the platform. This could be a subpage of the Taxa Info page, or a page of its own. It could also be implemented on the Taxon Changes page, by improving it to include a way to filter for taxa observed by the user.

In this new “Taxonomic Changes“ page, you should be able to filter for a specific taxa or group, and even more importantly, filter for your own observations. Taxonomic changes should then be listed by date of implementation, and have a reference for the reason behind the change.

2

i think the reason you want this is better addressed through existing functionality. there’s no way you’re going to manually keep track of all changes that are relevant to you using the sort of page you’re describing. you need to write code to handle this (described in that other thread). that’s going to do what you’re looking for much more efficiently and reliably.

3

This is a great idea. There is so much splitting of species going on that a history would be helpful. Even a community wiki on each species’ page where people could upload taxonomic history, links to papers, and any unsettled taxonomic questions would be good to have. Certainly some Poaceae groups are still quite in flux and unsettled (Stipa/Nassella/Eriocoma/Achnatherum, for example).

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