Disruptions Caused by Changing Taxonomy and Ways of Reconciling

[upupa-epops]

A recent example in plants:

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I just noticed the latest research (and iNat accordingly) has moved S. gigantea out of subsect. Triplinerviae to subsect. Serotinae instead. So now those tricky large goldenrods need to be ID’d up to sect. Unilaterales instead I guess…

Subsect. Serotinae (Rydb.) Semple & Beck included the North American Solidago gigantea Ait. and two South American species S. chilensis Meyen and S. microglossa DC. –– no obvious morphological feature unites these three species.

The 3 goldenrods (the gigantea/canadensis/altissima complex) formerly together in Triplinerviae are very abundant and very tricky to distinguish, so having them together in the same subsection was really useful for identification. Identifying them up to section Unilaterales means that the identification could also to refer to like 40 other species in 4 different subsections.

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

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The problem is that Cooper’s Hawk (now Astur with goshawks) and Sharp-shinned Hawk (still Accipiter) are similar in size and shape and from a poor view are often difficult to separate. Before this any difficult observations would’ve been put to genus, but now they’ll need to go all the up to subfamily, at a level shared with 11 genera and like 73 different species. That’s a very imprecise identification when that there are only actually 2 species options being referred to by it.

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.