I’ve noticed one complication with this taxon swap – old ID’s to genus Phalacrocorax are now wrong for this species, but because the genus still exists, they’re not going to update. So we need to be on the lookout for observations with an ID to the family Phalacrocoridae.
Phalacrocorax will be split once the double-crested cormorant swap is finished processing. No need to manually change old Phalacrocorax IDs now - they’ll all be updated automatically.
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I was just glancing through the current set of observations and notice that there are dozens of “Microcarbo” observations in North America where, to my knowledge, none of the actual Microcarbo species have been documented.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?locale=en&place_id=97394&preferred_place_id=1&subview=map&taxon_id=370634
I checked a random sample of these and they all seem to be cases where an initial misidentification (probably all due to iNat CV suggestions to observers unfamiliar with cormorants) has subsequently been corrected by multiple IDers as “Double-crested Cormorant” which is currently an “Inactive Taxon”. Can I assume these will all auto-correct to Nannopterum auritum at some point?
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Yep, all those IDs of now-inactive Phalacrocorax auritus no longer contributing to the community ID will eventually be automatically updated to Nannopterum auritum, pushing observations like the ones you mentioned back to the right species. (Since there are so many IDs affected by this swap—well over 200,000 if I remember correctly—it’ll just take a little while for all the old IDs to switch over, maybe a few days or so.)
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Thanks, good to know. I guess there’s no reason to worry, then.
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Waiting for the day when a taxonomist reviews a taxon and concludes that it is all correct as it stands. Yeah, right – there’s a reason they call it a “revision” before they’ve even done it!
It’s now been a few days, and so far nothing has changed. There’s still roughly the same number of Double-crested Cormorants that show up in the review queue as inactive taxon as there were a few days ago. Is this something that will slowly clear up over time, or just all of a sudden clear up once something crucial is refreshed?
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It should clear up over time – I’ve been keeping an eye on it as well, and there seem to be some changes. I’m not sure how the code works for this, but what it looks like to me is that it runs through all of the ID’s of a single user, then moves on to a new user.
I’ve gone ahead and committed the Phalacrocorax split, so old genus-level IDs should be updated over the next couple days or so.
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