I submitted two observations back in July. I used the AI suggested identification suggestion because, well, it seemed pretty obvious.
I am not a fungi expert in any way. I am just a beginner. But, another person just corrected my identification and added notes and links, which prompted me to enter this forum post.
Apparently, this shelf fungus has been massively misidentified as being common in North America. Here is the map on the species page here in iNat:
The False Turkey Tail is native to Indonesia as stated in the Wikipedia page for the species and the notes the other iNat user entered on my two observations. I have corrected my two observations to just the Genus level with some notes.
I am guessing that, years ago, a few people used the incorrect identification here in North America and things just snowballed. The map also shows this fungus to be living in other parts of the world outside of Indonesia.
So, how can this be dealt with? The incorrect identification is just going to continue because the incorrect False Turkey Tail identification is on top of the iNaturalist AI suggestions. And, people like me who don’t know fungi are going to accept it based on the iNat data. It just seems like the obvious choice.
(Or, is this actually False Turkey Tail?)
Here is one of my observations which I changed to the Genus level with notes:
This is probably best discussed on a taxon flag. If there was a change in the taxonomic concept, a taxon split may help. Otherwise manual IDs are best. That will also correct the CV.
Thanks for the response. Once again, I am just a beginner on fungi. So, I was hoping a more experienced/knowledgeable person would have a suggestion on this. I can’t believe that the person who corrected my observation and I are the first people to notice this.
I think it may be more complicated. I went to “fix” my one observation of this species (in Illinois) and found that it had been “RG”'d by @johnplischke, who is the worldwide top fungus identifier. I don’t think any major action should be taken without a consensus from some fungus experts. But if they agree a massive manual correction is in order, you can probably get volunteers from the Forum to chip away at it.
I’d be interested in assisting a massive manual correction (I’m think that’s what this will take) provided someone knowledgeable can lay out the parameters so that I’m not blindly clicking through
I don’t have any opinions on the taxonomy, but if the community agrees that the taxon concept has changed, then you should use a taxon split to automatically move the IDs.
I would suggest that you are not the first person to see this, as it is a fairly common issue across many datasets. For taxa or regions that have fewer identifiers, mis-identifications can indeed snowball and create issues. It is a problem with Millipedes for example. I’ve seen it to a smaller scale with bees (a lot Pyrobombus), and it’s one of the reasons why we tend to look so carefully at out of range observations.
Best solution is to place the proper ID’s, a lot of them.
Overall, for what my small opinion is worth, we should probably taxon swap all S. ostrea in the US to complex level. (One of the linked flags above mentioned it.) There are massive bulk sequencing efforts happening in the US and none have popped up matching S. ostrea from the type region (at least, as far as I can tell - there is one S. ostrea sequence on iNat that seems legit https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?subview=map&taxon_id=55496&verifiable=any&field:DNA%20Barcode%20ITS=)
Here are the sequenced iNat species maps for the three species she notes as being lumped incorrectly under S. ostrea