I was really hoping you’d be at NENHC in '23…I was there with students and two of the PA natural heritage field botanists, and I would have loved to sit down and talk about experiences. I think you’re sincere, and I really don’t understand why our impressions have been so different in what should be very similar pools of people.
I think a list of changes to the Flora might help find common ground, but that’s a big project and I don’t want to persist with this argument because I think we’ll just wind up madder at each other. (I might be interested in talking about databases and keeping track of field data, without endorsing lumping or splitting for those purposes.)
I know it’s not an offer you can redeem for a while, with work and kids and all, but if you’re ever “down Jersey” or close by at the right time, let me know and I’ll make sure you get to see some Narthecium. You would get a kick out of it–there are some really neat kinds of wetland down on the Coastal Plain, nothing like what you see in the mountains.
look, all i am trying to do is saying this community, that was really important to me, is being ruined for me and others have said it ruins it for them too. I understand some of you are really excited about changing the taxonomy, but you can at least listen and believe me instead of trying to prove my lived experience wrong. I feel like i’ve continually proposed some really reasonable alternatives but they just get immediately smashed for whatever reason and then people trawl through my observations trying to ‘disprove’ my experience.
This stuff just lacks basic empathy, especially how curators act on the site itself (not you Choess). This is what i mean when a lot of you should NOT have any form of site moderation privileges. If you can’t have any empathy for a long time user, in the very least you should just stick to taxonomy and not be able to answer flags about behavioral issues. I’d love to hear staff address the issue because they said years ago they were working on separating taxonomic curation from moderation, but i haven’t for a long time. This place just feels like a hollow echo of what it used to be and yes i ‘care too much’ but it just makes me really sad and it’s hard for me to move on.
That would have been awesome. I know some of the PA NHC people, or at least did. I’m actually not in a NHI program (the way my state’s system is set up is pretty weird) though i do work with them closely. And i am not casting shade on my NHI program either, they are just buried and have way too few resources. They do do some monitoring, and are a bit more accepting of taxonomy change than me, though no where near what iNat does. I think they mostly stick to Flora of Vermont.
I slept on it and i was frustrated yesterday but i’m not mad at you at all. I don’t think you’re damaging the site on purpose and you’ve always been kind to me. We will likely cross paths at some conference, one of these years. I promise in real life i don’t yell about taxonomy and come off still weird, but in a less aggressively opinionated and more fun way…
I should step back from this thread for a while. I hope some of you will actually just believe me that i care deeply about this community and feel like it’s on a very wrong path and that’s why i’m so upset. Same way i feel about my country. Probably i project the latter on the former because i have even less influence on awful US politics than I do on taxonomy. And yes all those broader problems are leading to a lot more bulldozed ecosystems than the taxonomy issues. But it’s just frustrating, i have a hard time letting things go, this community clearly isn’t right for me any more but i care too much to be able to leave, after investing so much and caring so much. This is a place for people like rhxnx who cah throw fast statistics and thrive in the academic system, or people like absolute newbies who don’t care about scientific names. it’s not a place for rabble rousing weirdos like me the way it used to be (or i thought it was). and that’s just how it goes. once something gets too big and established it’s not for me any more, i’m a community ruderal. Too much shading here, time to make some fluffy seeds and disappear from this species list.
I can give you three examples of statements made on another current thread:
I can start with red Russula, that’s one example. If it was possible to search comments on observations, I could come up with more by filtering for the taxon “fungi” and the comment containing “sequence” – as in a mycologist commenting that a “sequence” is what it would take to get them to agree to a species-level ID.
I don’t personally think that plants are at risk of getting that “bad”. You may disagree with me and say that plants are already that bad, or are getting there. If so, that disagreement would take us back to Chris’ query.
“Vascular plants” was meant to be implicit there, sorry.
From a nomenclatural perspective, you need to have some sort of morphological diagnosis and description for plants (vascular and otherwise), algae, etc. Fungi are semi-separate, but they are still studying the issue of allowing fungi to be named based on the sequencing of an entire genome; for now, you still need to have a conventional type specimen.
My impression from scrolling through a few recent Russula papers is that technically, described fungal species should be distinguishable from one another by morphology, but it often requires a lot of careful microscopy work (this Alan Rockefeller interview sort of implies it), and that mycologists tend to resort to DNA barcoding because it’s easier and less error-prone.
That said, I don’t know in practice how carefully diagnoses get checked in the literature, so maybe things are getting described in fungi that are nominally separable by micromorphological characters but that don’t work out in actual practice.
just for the record here are few macro-fungal species I quickly found mentioned/described in the literature in the last couple of years and said to be both macro- and microscopically indistinguishable:
I believe there is also an increasing problem of species authors stating morphological differences in a diagnosis statement that are not supported in practice. E.g. small differences in spore size or thickness and form of certain tissues - characters that are often associated with too much variability and can’t be used to differentiate. One gets the impression they were invented to satisfy the need for a diagnosis statement and to avoid the accusation that the evidence for the species is purely phylogenetic.
Having said that, large numbers of micro-fungi/pathogens are accepted as indistinguishable and only identifiable from sequence data. The available morphological characters are too few.
Yeah, and apparently that’s been in Flora Novae-Angliae since 2011, so evidently I haven’t been bothering to key out my clearweeds. :( The key in FSUS does not make it sound easily observed.
