Define "leaf taxa"

Could someone please define: “leaf taxa”

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Where did you see this term used on the iNaturalist website? I’m not familiar with it, and I suspect that other commenters will need to see where you saw the term being used to answer.

Just search “leaf taxa” in the forum search bar.

Leaf taxa are branches of the tree that haven’t been ID’d all the way to species. Say you observe a rose, but it doesn’t go to species and stays at genus, but that’s your first time ever seeing a member of the genus Rosa- that’s a unique leaf taxa. The leaf taxa count is typically higher than your actual species count due to that.

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“Leaf taxa” are the tips of taxonomic branches.
Rosa is not a leaf taxon since it has species subtending from it.

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iNaturalist appears to treat leaf taxa as any taxa in a given dataset that doesn’t have child taxa.

Under that definition, Rosa can indeed be a leaf taxon if the dataset under consideration is a collection of observations (e.g., user’s life list) and one of the observations is identified as Genus Rosa, provided no Rosa species are in the dataset.

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Here’s the page on ‘leaf count’ from the help pages: https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000194813-how-does-inaturalist-count-taxa-

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I think that in terms of what you have personally observed, leaf taxa means the following: A leaf taxa for what you have observed is the lowest taxonomic rank on a particular branch that you have observed. For example if you have observed a genus of mosses that is really hard to identify to species, so all of your observations of that genus are stuck at genus level. That genus would be a leaf taxa for you. If someone comes along and identified one of those observations down to species, then that species becomes a leaf taxa for your life list and the genus would no longer be considered a leaf taxa for your life list.

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