Since the update to the Clements checklist I’ve noticed that all of the “Herring Gull” (Larus argentatus sensu lato) observations in the Americas that were not IDed to subspecies have gone to European Herring Gull rather than American Herring Gull. Normally I’d be happy to pop through and fix everything, but as of this posting there are over 51k of these observations and a grad student can only click so much.
Do the curators have a way to shift these en masse, or should I just be patient and this is part of the taxon swap? Thanks!
The situtation here seems a bit messed up - several things have been changed that should only have been done concurrently with the taxon split actually being committed:
The taxa for American Herring, Vega, and Mongolian have been made active
The name has been changed to European Herring Gull.
Since the taxon in question currently represents observations for all the species in question, none of these changes should have been made yet. @donalddavesne
Just to clarify after looking a bit more, it’s not that the “new” taxa have been made active, it’s that they have been swapped with the subspecies taxa that were formerly under argentatus.
This is a problem since the observation view, data downloads etc. are now showing false information that two different species of gulls are present in many areas where only one actually occurs.
I’ve changed the common name back at least, I’m not sure if there’s anything that can or should be done about these subspecies taxa swaps.
So as an identifier, I’ll just sit tight for now? Seems like the issues are a little above my pay grade so to speak, but that it’ll be resolved in time.
Yeah, you just need to wait and the issue will eventually be resolved by curators. These large taxonomic changes can take a while to be fully committed.
Hi everyone, I’m the curator who created the species split, but I did not commit the subspecies-to-species swaps myself.
That being said, please keep in mind that this is a temporary situation.
Very large taxonomic changes like this one (it may actually be one of the largest in the history of iNaturalist, in terms of number of IDs - alongside the Cooper’s hawk a few weeks ago) are tricky because they need to be done by members of staff, otherwise they can overwork servers. Therefore, it can be hard to coordinate between us (curators) and members of staff.
We have notified @loarie and @tiwane who can commit the taxon split as members of staff. They are obviously very busy and cannot always respond immediately, but I’m sure it will be addressed in the next few days.
As for ourselves, we are doing curation on our free time, and it can be a tedious and time-consuming work, so sometimes it takes a while before everything is ironed out ;)
Hi All, I’m going to close the thread since discussions of specific curatorial actions on iNat itself should take place on flags on iNat itself. Feel free to pickup the conversation on an existing flag or make a new one there.
I was wondering what the plan or system is for updating and changing the categorization of species now that some have changed. These changes happened a while ago, I know, but I’ve still noticed some things that I expected to be different, two separate things just today. I know some other topics are a bit similar, but I wanted answers to this specific question.
This is a response I gave to someone on an observation:
" I haven’t looked at the others on this site, but seeing that Larus argentatus is now the default “Herring Gull” rather than European Herring Gull makes it seem that there may be other species that are “unfinished” in a way similar to this."
I’m not sure that “unfinished” is the correct word but it does, in a way, seem to be. This is screenshot is of a Redpoll observation. It being the second thing I’ve seen today made me wonder what the system is enough to post this. Once more, with this happening finally in August from what I see, I expected some different things. This Audubon article is what I remember reading a while ago and it seemed to be what would be followed on this platform. [https://www.audubon.org/magazine/lumping-redpolls-and-splitting-seabirds-years-updates-north-american-bird-names](https://www.audubon.org/magaz
If you are uncertain about the current status on iNat of a taxon where there have been recent changes, the “curation” button on the right side of the taxon pages is helpful. If you click on it you can view flags, which will often include discussion about needed changes and how to implement them, or you can view the taxon history, which will provide information about alterations to that taxon (including changes to common names).
