Help organizing Willow (Salix) taxonomy for iNaturalist

General
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Hi everyone,

Currently on iNaturalist the genus Salix has no subgeneric taxonomy despite having over 500 species. The big hindrance to adding subgenera and sections so far has been there there’s no source (as far as I know) that lays out the entire taxonomy for the whole world. There are only sources that cover North America, Russia and Europe, China, etc. separately.

We set up a Google Sheet that lists all the species, and started filling in subgeneric information for the first few. If you’re able to help, that would be awesome since there’s a ton of species: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZyIyso9OonTZRhhne1cdZNWjUCRZP3IUX42J5EvuXAo/edit

Here are the main sources:
Russia, Europe, and nearby areas: http://www.herba.msu.ru/shipunov/school/books/skvortsov1999_willows_of_russia.pdf / http://172.104.19.75/announcements/Skvortsov1999.html
North America: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250182087_Salix_Salicaceae_Distribution_Maps_and_a_Synopsis_of_Their_Classification_in_North_America_North_of_Mexico / https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1139/b76-297
China: http://flora.huh.harvard.edu/china/mss/volume04/SALICACEAE.published.pdf
Edit: Source that covers all of the above that I just found… http://www.fao.org/forestry/16387-064a6c432aa6ad67b71111974322d476f.pdf#page=81 / www.fao.org/3/a-i2670e.pdf#page=32

More discussion on the flag: https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/504010

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Apparently Salix may not be monophyletic. If this is actually the case it’ll make organizing the taxonomy a good bit more difficult.

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I finished adding the species from this source.

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Am I interpreting the paper correctly in that it refers just to subgenus Salix and that the issues can be resolved by moving one subgenus (Pleuradenia) and one other section (Triandrae) out of the subgenus?

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That’s kinda what it looks like, but I’d need to do a deeper reading to be sure of that.

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Don’t forget to include Iceland which has several species of Salix.

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That Argus publication for North America is brilliant, thank you!

Would Flora of North America work as a source for this project too? Being able to input Salix as subgenera would be so helpful - I’d be up for helping set up North America

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It looks like it uses Dorn and Argus as sources so I assume it would work. You could try going through section by section and adding the species to the spreadsheet, or go through the spreadsheet alphabetically and add the North American species, not sure which would be more efficient.

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Done North America. Where there seemed to be disagreement with what was in there, I put it in the comments. Also added some info to a few of the named hybrids - subgenus added if both parent species are in the same subgenus.

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Awesome, thanks so much! Most of the rest should be from east Asia then.

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Happy to help! It’ll be nice to get them down to subgenus/section like with Carex

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Speaking of Carex, I’ve no idea if this is related (I know nothing about plant taxonomy), but some Carex observations have been showing some wonky Community ID behavior (see this thread; example observation here). One hypothesis is that it may be because of all the sections/subgenera, but no idea myself. Anyways, might be good to look into before curating Salix taxonomy, in case there is some issue?

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Well, I was going to dive in on the Flora of China, but it looks like they only use section, not subgenera? I’m a bit confused

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Yeah the paper covering them doesn’t include subgenera. I’ve been able to find the subgenus for most of them by googling them though, since they’re mentioned in other papers with subgenera assigned. The only one I haven’t been able to find so far is Fulvopubescentes (I got all the species up to there already, the ones after that still have to be done).

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All the species from the main sources are done. What’s left are hybrids and more obscure species that I don’t have the resources for.

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This is a great project!
For updated information on Salicaceae, “Skvortsovia” is an excellent source: http://skvortsovia.uran.ru

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