The title mostly says it, but I was wondering why the subfamily for the Hawaiian honeycreepers isn’t on iNaturalist. Is this the case for all bird subfamilies, or just Drepanidinae?
Many bird subfamilies are not included since each additional rank adds some load to iNat’s servers (especially ones like birds that hold lots of observations). You can try adding a flag on the family and arguing that it would be very beneficial for identifying.
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To add to what Caleb said, iNat is not meant to be an encyclopedic reference of biodiversity. Taxa are only added as they are observed.
For example, there is massive biodiversity in every teaspoon of soil, with mites, nematodes, and many other critters. But you will not find many of them on iNat, since they are almost impossible to observe and identify, unless you have specialized equipment.
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Okay, thank you for the clarification! I was curious to know about the reasoning behind it so that’s good to know.
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(heads-up that this is no longer widely considered a distinct subfamily. Fringillidae is typically divided into 3 subfamilies nowadays: Fringillinae for Fringilla, Euphoniinae for Euphonia and Chlorophonia, and Carduelinae for everything else; the latter can be divided into several tribes, one of those being Drepanidini)
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Thanks, that’s good to know. It can be hard to find up-to-date resources on that kind of stuff online.
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