Efficient way to search for missing taxa

Curators
1

Odonata is missing a taxon. I discovered this when checking for taxon framework relationship of Odonata. For species taxa, there’s only 6355 framework. But WOL listed 6356 species.
Any idea how to find it?
I don’t want to brute force it, checking thousands of taxa is not an easy job.

1 Like
2

Is it related to this? https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/unknown-clade-in-yir-sunburst-diagram/28141

3

No, a different topic.

4

i don’t think it’s that easy.

first, i assume the 6356 WOL number comes from https://www2.pugetsound.edu/academics/academic-resources/slater-museum/biodiversity-resources/dragonflies/world-odonata-list2/, but their download contains only 6345 species. (so already you’re starting off with only a partial list on the WOL side.)

you can export a list of iNat species from https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_taxa.html?taxon_id=47792&rank=species, which gets data from the iNat API. currently it returns 6355 species, as you noted.

assuming iNat Odonata taxa use WOL as their authority, you would think that you could just compare the 2 lists and look for mismatches. but it’s hard to sort through all the names/synonyms perfectly, since iNat doesn’t store the author and date of names.

these taxa from the 6355 iNat list don’t match a taxon in the 6345 WOL list, nor any synonyms of taxa in WOL:

Paraphlebia akan
Paraphlebia chaak
Paraphlebia chiarae
Paraphlebia esperanza
Paraphlebia flinti
Paraphlebia hunnal
Paraphlebia itzamna
Paraphlebia ixchel
Paraphlebia kauil
Paraphlebia kinich
Paraphlebia kukulkan
Wahnesia misimia

it looks like there are 3 species from the 6345 WOL list which don’t have corresponding species in iNat at all:

Nesobasis rito
Platycnemis sasakii
Wahnesia misima

but then there are a ton of taxa from WOL which don’t have a match specifically to the 6355 iNat taxa, either directly or through a synonym:

(list removed)

but then when i search for taxa from that latter WOL list of mismatches, i am able to find them in iNat. (they just don’t get picked up as one of the 6355 Odonata species in iNat via the API for some reason.) so there might actually be at least 6355 + 730 = 7085 Odonata species in iNat, and to get a more complete list, you might have to get it from another source, like the dwca export (https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/inaturalist-taxonomy.dwca.zip).

UPDATE: some of my statements in this post were incorrect. i’ve corrected them here and in a new post in this thread.

5 Likes
5

Keep in mind there are also deviations on iNat not on WOL.
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_framework_relationships?utf8=✓&filters[match]=0&filters[alternate_position]=0&filters[alternate_position]=1&filters[one_to_one]=0&filters[one_to_one]=1&filters[many_to_many]=0&filters[many_to_many]=1&filters[many_to_one]=0&filters[many_to_one]=1&filters[one_to_many]=0&filters[one_to_many]=1&filters[not_external]=0&filters[not_external]=1&filters[not_internal]=0&filters[not_internal]=1&filters[taxon_framework_id]=6&filters[taxon_name]=&filters[taxon_id]=&filters[external_taxon_name]=&filters[internal_rank]=&filters[external_rank]=&filters[user_id]=&filters[is_active]=

6

Woah, thank you for the data. I actually never think to search from the API, but i guess many unlisted features come from there.
From the data that you’ve given, it’s clear for me that this taxon need many curation. And now i have a data to work with.
Thank you again

1 Like
7

No worry, they are mainly hybrids. Not considered species.

8

sorry. i need to follow up on this a bit. this statement is actually wrong.

i realized that my page was exporting taxa in a way that resulted in some taxa getting duplicated and others getting dropped. the API is returning all 6355 – now 6356 – taxa, but it’s ordering them in a way that’s inconsistent across pages. (by default, it orders by observation count descending, which means taxa with the same observation count could be ordered inconsistently. i changed my export function to order explicitly by taxon id, which should force a consistent ordering across pages, thereby resolving the issue.)

that said, i redid my analysis, and it looks like a few taxa have already been fixed since my last post:

  • Wahnesia misimia was changed to Wahnesia misima
  • Nesobasis rito was added
  • Platycnemis sasakii was added

so then now there are no taxa in the WOL 6345 list which don’t have match in iNat, and these 11 taxa in iNat are the only ones missing from the WOL 6345 list:

Paraphlebia akan
Paraphlebia chaak
Paraphlebia chiarae
Paraphlebia esperanza
Paraphlebia flinti
Paraphlebia hunnal
Paraphlebia itzamna
Paraphlebia ixchel
Paraphlebia kauil
Paraphlebia kinich
Paraphlebia kukulkan

since we know that the WOL 6345 list is short of the WOL reported total taxa of 6356 by 11, then i assume those 11 taxa above will match the taxa missing in the WOL 6345 list.

so all is well in Odonata species land.

1 Like
9

Yep, i did the fixing with the data you’ve given.
Other than that, i figure out one synonymized taxon was present, so i merge it with the accepted taxa.

And yes, the 11 taxa are the missing taxa on WOL list, they just didn’t updated it yet.

1 Like
10

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.