Disruptions Caused by Changing Taxonomy and Ways of Reconciling

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Now and then I hear, with varying degrees of intensity, that changes to taxonomy are disruptive to citizen scientists – like disruptive to a degree that is harmful. While I don’t share this view (or at least I don’t share the view that it’s that severe of an issue), I am genuinely curious to understand it better. However, the specific avenues in which I’ve heard this perspective expressed were too specific to make pursuing the matter further, then and there, appropriate.

So I wanted to start this topic and ask the question: Do you ever find something you do in or with iNaturalist disrupted by changes to taxonomy? If so, can you elaborate with specific details? What is it that you do that is disrupted? How (or in what way) is it disrupted? How do you deal with those disruptions? Or do you? Put me in your shoes. I want to feel your pain.

For me, my usage of iNaturalist is pretty basic. I use it to (1) upload observations of the plants (and sometimes bugs, fungi, etc.) I observe in my yard as an exercise in capturing/understanding/sharing knowledge about plant morphology, and (2) identify observations of plants as a way to share my knowledge with others and to exercise, refine, and expand that knowledge.

My usage of iNaturalist is part of a larger hobby of amateur botany. I am not a practicing botanist (though I did make a collection for my local herbarium once!), biologist, ecologist, conservationist, data scientist, etc. I do not export any information from iNaturalist and would not consider myself a consumer of its biodiversity data (other than as a means to the ends I listed earlier).

For me the disruption comes in the difference between the names listed in florae to that in iNaturalist. For example, Polygonum aviculare subsp. buxiforme (and lots of Polygonum-now-Persicaria-or-Fallopia-or-Reynoutria species for that matter), Conyza canadensis, Urtica dioica subsp. gracilis, and various other taxa are all present in my florae of choice. However, in iNaturalist these are called something else. So it creates a needs to reconcile the names between the two places. However, I have a pretty good memory and a small pool of species I’m currently working with, so I just remember that, for exanple, Conyza canadensis in my flora is actually called Erigeron canadensis on iNaturalist.

If it ever becomes difficult to keep track of these differences just in my own memory, I imagine I could start penciling in the alternative names in my flora. (Though, I could only do this with my physical, local flora. I use the online version of Flora of North America too, so not sure what I’d do for that. I guess I’d have to lean on the synonym functionality within iNaturalist – type in what the flora calls it and hope that iNaturalist suggests the right taxon in its place.)

How about you?

NOTE: This topic is focused on practical, not philosophical, issues. Its purpose is not to talk about the pace at which taxonomy should change, whether it should change, the validity of those changes, or about proposals to handle them differently moving forward. It is focused on understanding the practical ways in which taxonomic change impacts us collectively and how we manage those impacts today.

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The only disruption that I am aware of, and I only became aware accidentally, is that sometimes my Identifications become Mavericks without my knowing due to taxonomic changes.

@vreinkymov posted this:

For anyone else who makes mistakes and forgets to check them when corrected, these two URLs are useful (replace with your username):

Uncorrected Misidentifications:

Withdrawn Misidentifications:

I’m not sure what correcting the ones in the first URL is called, but I call it doing a “maverick sweep” and it’s worth reviewing it every month or two.

in another thread (now closed) and when I entered my own name I became aware of this foible.

At the time I fixed all my Maverick IDs and made a mental note to check those links periodically but promptly forgot until now, so perhaps I have new Mavericks due to new taxonomic changes. (I will check again after posting. Whee!)

Otherwise taxonomic changes don’t affect me much.

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Most of the “disruptive” changes I’ve heard about on this forum and elsewhere seem to involve plants. For vertebrate animals, there are changes and disagreements and a few parallel taxonomies in current use, but I don’t see it causing any real disruption in communication or function. Most of us using those taxonomies accept that more than one name may be used for certain animal species and we just go with what we prefer or use the alternative name(s) when necessary. But the difference might be in the number of species affected (vertebrates are fewer in number than plants).

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A recent example in plants:

Another recent example with birds (there were 2-3 different threads on the forum discussing this one):

Further up in that thread I mentioned a potential change that might happen with Sandwich Terns, again another example where genetic analysis indicated that the current definition of the species is paraphyletic.

I do birds on eBird and eBird has more flexibility about handling these changes than iNat, so those changes are more just trivia for me (although they do affect many iNat obs). But the goldenrod one does affect a number of my observations.

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The recent Accipiter change might be rather disruptive and seems it has been for iNat records. I guess that’s still shaking out. I honestly don’t see how Cooper’s Hawk and Sharp-shinned end up in different genera, but what do I know? ;-)

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It seems like sparrowhawks split off from goshawks a long time ago but were content to stay basically the same, just a bit smaller. Harriers split off from goshawks more recently but randomly decided they wanted to try to be as similar to Short-eared Owls as they could get, instead of being happy as hawks. So Cooper’s Hawk is more closely related to harriers than to Sharpies, despite the obvious respective differences/similarities.

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That’s a good summary. I’ll go with that. Thankfully the common names are stable, for the moment.

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If I have understood the complaints correctly, there are two main problems:

  1. hyper-splitting of plants into micro-species that cannot be IDed without DNA-analysis (the best example is probably dandelions)
  2. sometimes the “false taxonomies” (false in terms of not following phylogeny/cladistics) that have been used thus far are more practical for field- and conservation biology, etc. and allow for finer identification than the phylogenetic taxonomy

(a third problem is curators being too trigger-happy when it comes to committing changes, but I view that as a problem with iNat curation and not with taxonomic changes in general)

I think @charlie might be interested in this topic, and will be able to answer this better than I can, though

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Ok well since you asked…

i am an ecologist by career and by passion and have to monitor large areas with very little resources or staff help. The changes and microsplitting do cause big big problems including:

-I had big plans to use iNat as my main data collection platform and export data to my database. It isn’t doable because the iNat species names will never match my database and it would be a full time job making my database match iNat’s intense taxonomic revisionism.

-we use plant species as a proxy for wetland condition and function, past land use history, etc. So we create species lists of wetlands. While some species like Ovales group sedges are very difficult, overall we aim to be able to identify most vascular plants in a plot when we do surveys. With the new cryptic species concept, it becomes impossible to do so, like there is no way to identify the dandelion microspecies at all, so now they just get identified to genus. Or ignored entirely. Basically the new hypersplitting and constant changes ruin ‘vascular plant species’ as a meaningful level of identification for assessing ecosystem function and condition. Which seems a huge huge deal to me. Some people think some genetic discretion (which is constantly redefined and subjective) is more important than the old defacto species concept which was ‘a mostly coherent entity that humans can tell apart when they are on the landscape’. That’s what species have always been before and that is the entity we as humans engage with.

-we also coordinate with landowners, school classes, etc a lot. I used to recommend iNat to all of them but I do not any more, because the names of plants do not match field guides, old data, cultural knowledge or anything else. They just frustrate people. It’s actually been several years since i offered an unconditional recommend to use inat to anyone full stop. What’s the point of using a website to learn the plants in your yard and identify them, if the names make no sense, don’t match anything else, and change on a monthly basis?

-in regard to old data, there is a wealth of older data buried in notebooks and such throughout many institutions and libraries and field notebooks, but it can’t be used with iNat data. Often with splits the old data becomes nearly useless, for instance jack in the pulpit was split into three semi cryptic species, and the old IDs for jack in the pulpit just can’t be used any more because who knows which cryptic species it was that was observed in 1990. At least in that case a species complex was created, but the current crew of taxonomists throw an absolute fit when asked to create a complex identical to the past existing species concept, even though it’s a reasonable compromise. It’s supposedly polyphylletic (which is usually not even settled science, and who cares anyway. It’s a complex used to track biodiversity not a species entity used to display genetic discreteness. Right now there’s this push to split nettle, Urtica dioica, into two species which the proposal is to put thousands (or more) Urtica dioica observations back to genus. Because they don’t want to create a species complex because one paper which might not even be published yet, says the academic taxonomist doesn’t want to. If you want to do the splits and changes, and want to reconcile that with every other user who isn’t a splitty revisionist, creating an in-taxonomy entity exactly equivalent to the old species is absolutely necessary.

-cryptic species and new species are much more difficult to identify, and also the changes are hard to keep up with, and it disadvantages the same groups that are disadvantaged by everything else - people with less money or resources for whatever reason. iNat is meant to connect people with nature, and i remember that used to be pushed even at the expense of data quality. But now there’s this idea to make the species complex totally unusable to anyone without a direct line to academia. What happened to a site for everyone? If someone like me whos a trained ecologist is running into major issues, it’s going to be much worse for people with no training at all.

-The subspecies rank already exists and is ideal for micro scale variation and cryptic genetic entities. For reasons i don’t understand the current trend is to not have subspecies and push everything to species level, at least with plants. iNat should not follow this trend. We should not blindly follow POWO or any other such entity, especially when it’s obviously harmful.

iNat used to be a mildly subversive alternative to academia, to those of us too poor, neurodivergent in the wrong ways, or otherwise marginalized from an intensive academic track. It’s now just trying to glom onto academia for some reason. No hate on academia in general - i’ve got a graduate degree albeit an unconventional one. But academia is NOT the only way to look at the world. iNat needs to be brave and do things like keep things at subspecies, limit rate of change, and create holding bins within the taxonomic framework that may be polyphylletic (after all there’s already tons of those and with hybridization and backcrossing it’s never clear cut anyway). If iNat just becomes another arm of academia it’s going to fizzle out. It serves little purpose at that point. We need to be something that spans multiple worlds, not just a ‘POWO Puppet’. We need to not have activist curators butchering the site’s taxonomy against the will of most of its users and leveraging their moderation privileges to do it. Choosing a better path is hard beacuse it’s worth doing. It’s hard beacuse no one has blazed this path before. We need to choose iNat as an inclusive wide spanning community, or we will end up just losing it over time as it gets absorbed into NatureServe or something.

There’s more, much more, but this is already long so i’ll start with just this, and a link to my journal where there’s other similar thoughts and discussion including comments by many people who agree with me. https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/charlie
My abnormal heart rate warning is going off on my watch so i’ll leave it at that.

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Most of the disruptions I see are from poorly done changes (bad/no atlases for splits, hasty changes that don’t investigate all literature). Far and away taxon changes are hugely beneficial for the groups I work with (mollusks) because there is so much need for study and revision. Every time there’s a change we can say, “Finally, now we have robust names to apply to all these observations!”

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Thank you @charlie , I hadn’t known a practical reason for why it can be disruptive, and you have detailed it well. I personally enjoy watching them roll in, it demonstrates that the field is relatively new and we are moving a step closer (though possibly sideways as well) towards the ‘truth’. I also appreciate that the world of botany is wildly different to animals, but perhaps it is also the case that we are more ignorant of plant relationships than animals, because we are biased towards things more like ourselves.
In the case of species being knocked back to a higher classification, even though there may only be two possible species, is it not possible to make a note stating which ones it may be? Though I appreciate that is clunky.
WRT to species being used as indicators, I hadn’t considered that, in that case must we say ‘X habitat using species from Y and Z’, if we are not able to ID?’.

While I believe it will all shake out in the end - I don’t see a future where barcoding does not become radically cheaper and easier, for the time being I think we must all get used to sitting with much more uncertainty, something that goes against the nature of the types of things that we here like to do.

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If I have understood the complaints correctly

FWIW, having tried to do this myself, I learned the hard way that you have to ask for very specific examples if you want to make any headway. “Can you give me three examples of species that are now separated only by genetics?” It turns out that a lot of the complaints about taxonomy on this forum aren’t literally true; they’re just elaborate expressions of frustration with the fact that taxonomy and species circumscriptions aren’t completely stable, and can’t really be taken seriously as descriptions of the state of the field.

When we last had a thread about this (you can probably find it by searching for Caulophyllum, I’m pretty sure it was discussed), the big pain point when vascular plant species get split isn’t that they’re morphologically indistinguishable, but that it gets harder: things that you used to be able to ID to species while jogging past at 10 feet now require flowering/fruiting material, perhaps only at a certain season. (i.e., splitting Asarum canadense). There have always been taxa that are hard or impossible to identify without fertile material at the right time (i.e., Nabalus, Desmodium) but it is annoying when more things get shoved into that pile.

The problem with dandelions is slightly different. Because of extensive, but not exclusive, asexual reproduction in the genus, the continuum of variation between individuals can’t be divided into reasonable species units in the way we’re used to for sexual taxa. This is also an old problem, and doesn’t depend on molecular biology: several genera in Rosaceae, such as Crataegus and Rubus are long-notorious for similar issues as to what constitutes a “species”, with splitty and lumpy views prevailing at different times. I think dandelions have just been overlooked until relatively recently in North American botany because they’re alien.

Having finished a summer of contract botanical ID in the mid-Atlantic using taxonomy and keys from FloraQuest (based on Weakley’s FSUS, which is definitely on the splitty end), the splitting isn’t nearly the problem it’s usually made out to be in the forum. Is some of it annoying? Yes, definitely. (Pilea pumila s.l. is really two entities? Are you kidding?) But even if you’re clutching your comforting, lumping, Gleason & Cronquist (2nd ed., 1991) for ID, your reording system is still going to have to support annotations equivalent to “cf”, “aff”, and so on, because you’ll still run into individuals that are difficult to pin down to species because the material is inadequate, you’re there at the wrong time of year, and so on, and you have to write down something. In practice, it pretty much comes out in the wash: if you have two taxa that are difficult to distinguish, and your estimate of the conservation value of the site is materially affected by identifying the taxon correctly, you’re going to have to take pains to seek it out at the right time and make that difficult ID, whether the two taxa are ranked as species or subspecies or varieties.

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This would work for observation identification, but that data won’t get exported or at least the data in the comment won’t afaik.

I think this is an issue, personally. Sure, a lot of stuff just cannot be translated 1:1 between kingdoms, but there is no reason for zoology to not allow sub-subspecies ranks, for example. Or in general to have both ICZN and ICN/ICBN instead of having one centralised code.

This is true, but in practice it sometimes amounts to the same thing. Individuals simply don’t always show clearly all the features necessary for species ID, and with more and more obscure features to look for, non-IDable records become more and more common, as well as old records becoming obsolete.
Taxonomy is meant to be a useful tool for organising data. For relatedness we already have cladistics/phylogeny. And while I personally think that taxonomy should follow those at least so much as to not outright violate it (not a fan of para- or polyphyly), I do understand the push against this if it threatens data that has thus far been useful.
(I mean, with the textbook species-definitions usually not being applicable in these situations anyway, committing splits at subspecies-rank rather than at species seems like a good compromise to me. Is there any reason to not do this?)

I mean, on an infrastructure side of things, another solution would be to add multiple possible IDs instead of defaulting to use a lower precision taxon, but I’m afraid that would require quite substantial changes to a lot of sites.

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This has me curious and my business/systems analyst senses tingling. If you don’t mind my asking…

Were you to do it, who would import the data into your database and how? Is it you or someone else? Do you just upload the CSV into your database using some frontend application? Does your database maintain synonyms? Or just the accepted names? Are you able to transform the data prior to import into your database?

In other words, if you can’t change the names in iNat, and you can’t change the names in your database, perhaps you can change them while the data is in flight between the two?

If you’re using Excel or some other spreadsheet software, I can imagine ways you might use formulas and data validation or maybe macros to run the iNat data through an approved name list/converter or something.

If you have access to someone tech-savvy, they might even be and to set up some ETL process for you.

These would all entail extra steps, but once set up shouldn’t be too bad to maintain. That said, I don’t know how many species you’re dealing with or how many of those have different names and how much time and energy you’re willing/able to spend setting that up or maintaining it.

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This might be one of the reasons for differences in opinion here… For example there have been 500 species of birds ever recorded in Ontario, and if I remember correctly 4,000 species of plants.

If the taxonomy changes for only 1% of species each year, that’s only 5 species of birds changing but 40 species of plants changing. If you’ve been working in the field for 10 years then that’s a lot of changes to keep on top of over time, even if the rate of change is pretty slow and only affecting a small fraction of species overall. Also botanists use scientific names more than birders do, so botanists’ identifications are much more affected when a species is moved from one genus to another, which is what a significant portion of these changes consist of.

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I guess my comment was specifically touching on the problems associated with managing name differences within a process to export iNaturalist data, clean and transform it, and import it into some other database.

Once you map the names for your initial set of species, it might not be very cumbersome (depending on the nature of the workflow involved) to additionally map a new name or so per week (using your example’s math for the sake of illustration).

Speaking all hypotheticals here though, not knowing the current realities and viable adjustments to Charlie’s flow. It’s very possible the constraints are such that there is indeed no viable option, but I figured it worth asking about at least.

I agree though that trying to remember the “current” name accepted by someone else for everything you encounter as a field botanist would be a nightmare. However, my impression is that most mainly worry about remembering the names that they personally accept, and if they need to remember (or use) the “current” name for some practical application, well, that’s what books and computers are for.

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it would be possible to create species complexes or ‘holding bins’ but the taxonomists don’t want to because they don’t feel it fits their genetic scheme properly. Making notes doesn’t work, becuase you lose their place in the database that way. It’s more than just clunky, it makes them pretty unusable.

I don’t follow this, sorry. if you make a bunch of cryptic species on one hand, and genus on the other hand, without anything in between that matches the old species, you lose the ability to use the species concept for those taxa in an applied field setting.

the thing is we are experiencing mass extinctions and ecosystem collapse and the geneticists are slowly ‘shaking out’ the primary tool used for ecosystem monitoring, breaking it when it’s absolutely crucial for it to be usable. Maybe some day we will have it all ‘figured out’ and all have genetic sequencers, but by then half the species may be dead and i hope the taxonomists are happy that they sacrificed a bunch of them for the sake of purity of classification. I am ok with ‘sitting with uncertainty’ on a nature walk, but when the choice is between a polyphylletic group and a bulldozer in a wetland, which one would you choose? Most taxonomists seem to choose the bulldozer. Which sucks.

I kinda also doubt any time in the next 100 years that barcoding becomes available to marginalized people, so it’s just one more wedge dividing them from the ability to engage with nature. I guess if we get a star trek future sure, but we seem to be heading more for brave new world meets handmaidens tale…

So yeah.

i’m glad it isn’t a problem for you, but it certainly is for me and others around me and you aren’t helping anything by diminishing an issue just because it doesn’t cause you problems personally.

i don’t know if you’re just doing this stuff on your own time or what but in the actual applied conservation world there is no ‘making pains’ to doing harder things because there simply is no staff and money to do so. It means it simply doesn’t happen. if you find a way to triple the staffing and funding for all ecosystem monitoring, i’ll remove my objection to this all. I’ll even adapt your hated splitter names. But it isn’t gonna happen. Things are about to get worse, not better, at least in the USA. I’d hoped iNat would be a flexible, versatile, cheap way to keep doing inventory as other things collapsed around us, but unfortunately that just isn’t going to be the case, it’s becoming a weaker, less useful tool for that by the day.

our database is just managed by me, because we have no capacity to get help with it. I can upload a list of scientific names and use it to generate biocriteria about an area. But they need to match a list i already have on the database to do this and no it isn’t viable to constantly change all the broken ones imported from inat to their correct names especially as inat’s names diverge more and more from what everyone else uses. The problem is it isn’t just a one time thing, which would be ok. The changes are ongoing and even accelerating.

“If you have access to someone tech-savvy”

I don’t and am not ever going to, probably. Would be nice if i did.

yeah vermont has 2700 vascular plant species on inat right now. i suppose without the splits it would be a bit fewer but the real issue is the changing. it’s certainly over 1% a year.

it’s just a real miserable conversation, having to convince people that the damage is real, when i see it every day and i have no reason to lie about it. i’m not getting funded by a ‘big lumper’ superpac i just thought iNat was going to be a valuable and powerful tool and it’s miserable to see a community and passion i loved and have been a part of since 2011 being ruined for me and for others i know. Trying to tell me it isn’t being ruined for me when that’s my lived experience does not help one bit. I’ll probably eventually just leave again, which maybe would make the taxonomists happy, but the bulldozers will roll on and the site will start to get pretty empty over time i think…

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‘X habitat using species from Y and Z’, if we are not able to ID?’.

It was more or less intended as ‘ID at higher level, leave a note describing species or habitat associations’, but as @eyekosaeder this is a non starter as the notes/others are not exported with it.
I suppose the other problem is that we don’t know which will be reassigned, and we also don’t know which characters will become diagnostic (if any), so it’s not possible to guess what evidence we need to take now, to deal with future reclassifications.

The thing is we are experiencing mass extinctions and ecosystem collapse and the geneticists are slowly ‘shaking out’ the primary tool used for ecosystem monitoring, breaking it when it’s absolutely crucial for it to be usable.

I had approached this from the perspective of Michael Sharkey - ‘we must sequence everything, else we will lose species before traditional taxonomy can describe them’, without considering what that means for actually protecting them. Thank you for describing your experience, it is sobering.

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Bear with me here.

Is/was your initial desire to upload occurrence data (like specific dates and times and/or locations of observations)? Or just a checklist of names?

Are the names in your database aligned with any particular published (or otherwise publicly available) reference? If not, do you have the ability to export the names from your database?

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I’m still skeptical. 1% of 2700 would be 27. Do you think it would actually be possible to list 27 species on Vermont’s list for which the taxonomy has changed in 2024? Plants aren’t my area of expertise of course but I feel like the rate of change for birds is closer to 0.5%, and I would have expected it to be lower for plants since birds are a more popular research subject.