How do we deal with the thousands of highly contested GLOVAP new combinations?

Curators
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This is not the same to compare GLOVAP with that of some reptiles or insects. Most of those name changes were badly needed. For example name changes were made from Sansevieria to Dracaena. It was known for a long time that the distinction between Sansevieria and Dracaena were artificial. It was recently decided not to follow POWO on this change.

Some name changes in Amaryllidaceae were incorporated perhaps somewhat uncritically in Nat. Other changes e.g. in Hippeastrum in this family has been followed by new recently published studies by highly published experts in this family and this will be undoubtedly an improvement on GLOVAP or the current accepted classification.

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I’ve been pretty closely involved in dealing with GLOVAP fallout as the local pteridophyte factotum. As @robertarcher397 points out, GLOVAP doesn’t affect alpha-taxonomy; that is, it isn’t describing new species which are probably junior synonyms of others, as in some of the cases mentioned on this thread.

While GLOVAP is not directly affiliated with Kew, I would describe the authors as being at least “Kew-adjacent”; for instance, Maarten Christenhusz has collaborated with Mark W Chase (at Kew, of Angiosperm Phylogeny Group fame) to publish a fern classification in 2014. This forms the basis of the POWO fern classification, but it has encountered fairly strong resistance among the pteridological community, and the PPG I system of fern classification was published more or less as a response to that.

In following the jousting over fern classification that led up to PPG I, GLOVAP, etc., my subjective impression is that some of the figures associated with Kew and GLOVAP are of the opinion that specialists have promulgated over-splitting in various taxonomic groups, and that a push towards lumping is necessary to get more reasonably-sized(?) or more directly comparable(?) higher taxonomic units like families. (That said, I’ve never seen this explicitly avowed in the literature for the position, which usually argues that lumping is necessary to secure taxonomic stability against phylogenetic uncertainty.)

GLOVAP aimed at creating a classification of monophyletic genera encompassing all vascular plants; it was built to be the backbone of a database like POWO. While I disagree strongly with some of their generic circumscriptions, I can understand why they might choose to accept a good-enough classification that’s available now to implement POWO, rather than wait decades for some puzzles to get sorted out.

As far as what iNat should do, that answer really varies from group to group. In some cases, the new circumscriptions made by GLOVAP are probably reasonable and sensible and should be adopted; in others, it’s better not to take them up and to place the GLOVAP combinations in synonymy. (e.g., I’ve been slowly working my way through subfamily Cheilanthoideae, which GLOVAP lumps into the single genius Hemionitis doing just that, because I don’t think anyone outside of Kew is going to accept them–generic delimitation among the cheilanthoids is terribly frustrating, but lumping them into one genus fails to escape the problem of morphological incoherence.)

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Please don’t do this. Kew is perfectly aware that GLOVAP is highly controversial; they have their reasons and needs for adopting it, and this is unlikely to have any result other than loss of time and temper for all parties concerned.

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Where might I read about the reasons and needs for adopting GLOVAP? Kew and PoWO drive plant identifications in iNaturalist, and those identifications now drive taxonomy in my ethnobotany class. As an instructor I like to be able to explain why a name is changing. So many plants have changed, which complicates looking up plants in older flora. Out here some of the islands get a new fairly complete flora on the order of once in 50 years, some islands may have only one done many years ago, so cross-referencing gets complicated when many names have changed. Being able to explain the reasons and needs driving the changes is helpful.

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Kew’s better positioned to defend that than I am, but as I understand it, it’s roughly a question of:

  1. They committed to launching a global flora by this year (http://www.plantsoftheworldonline.org/about) and they needed a backbone so that every plant species in the world can be assigned to genus, family, etc.
  2. They would like this taxonomy to be stable, so genera should be monophyletic.
  3. (This is my speculation, the other 2 are explicitly avowed) They feel that specialists in various groups have engaged in too much splitting of families and genera and that a general authority needs to exert some pressure towards lumping as a counterbalance.

Point 3), if it really is a goal on Kew’s part is, I think, philosophically defensible, but obviously they’ve also angered a lot of specialists, and as they’re the people who do the alpha-taxonomy (description of individual species), I think that’s gone a long way to undermine their averred goal of taxonomic stability.

Bear in mind here that this is essentially all a matter of taste. The disputes here are, by and large, not about species boundaries or about their placement in a phylogenetic tree. The question is, in a given phylogenetic tree, what clades should have names and taxonomic ranks. e.g., if we have a large clade with three subclades, do we designate the subclades as genera X, Y, and Z, or should they all go in an (expanded) genus X? This is ultimately a question of taste. It isn’t always possible to define a genus to be of a convenient size (not too many or too few species), morphologically well-marked, and monophyletic. So questions of that sort may ultimately have to be worked out by different authors and workers trying out different circumscriptions for genera and seeing what, in practice, seems to work out best for botanists. This is, of course, terribly frustrating for those of us caught in the middle who would just like a single definitive answer, but there’s no easy way out.

e.g., Ebihara & Iwatsuki’s classification of the trichomanoid filmy ferns (subfamily Trichomanoideae in PPG I) breaks them into 8 genera, separated on somewhat technical characters. Flora of New Zealand (and the Christenhusz & Chase classification) go back to placing them all in one broadly circumscribed genus Trichomanes on the grounds that distinguishing the 8 genera in the field is not practically possible in many cases. However, this makes for a very large genus (several hundred species). There are reasonable arguments for both splitting and lumping, and it’s hard to say which one is better in practice without trying both arrangements out.

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To be clear, my suggestion was to contact Kew just to gain their perspective so that we did not have to speculate on why they made these decisions, not to challenge them for making them.

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Actually, there is a simple solution. Chose to use the names you are comfortable with, usually the ones you first learn, and ignore the changes of others. For me, an Aster and a Eupatorium will always be the same. I know Symphotrichum may be “correct” but other taxonomists can sort that out after my collection or photo is made. Freezing taxonomy is not the best solution, but it would please many people and it keeps my life simple. At age 67, I’ve decided I’m not going to bother being genetically correct based on DNA sequencing. My point? Keep it simple on the surface and let the people with DNA sequencing skills sort out the details. They can annotate my specimens in any way they want because in 200 years, I certainly won’t care if I could! How can this website manage it? As the saying goes, choose your battles carefully. The rules of nomenclature were written for a past generation. They could be adapted to current reality without changing the name of every species I’ve ever learned. Think outside the box perhaps and have a “frozen” name and published name. Maybe we need to let groups decide on accepting or rejecting new names and no longer allow “any validly published name” to survive. If there were only 20 botanical journals in existence, that might work. But when I can create my own journal and publish names on line, the system is broken. That’s my point. We need a new system and freezing names (with an option perhaps for a second unfrozen name used as well (two names together)) is one option. Obviously, science is a group procedure and someone has a better idea!

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I’m sorry, when I read this I can’t help but chuckle at the naivete of Kew’s goal, worthy as it is.

tl;dr: The fundamental problem of where you draw the line is still an unsolved issue. GLOVAP has taken the lazy approach to fixing the issue. Details below:

There is nothing to indicate that GLOVAP’s classification will be any more stable than any other. In most classifications, the main decision is simply one of where to draw the line between higher-level taxa, and there has always been disagreement in this front, as it’s a subjective choice. In some cases the decision of GLOVAP to lump was because ONE (single) study found polytomies in their phylogeny and was unable to resolve higher-level morphotaxa into monophyletic clades. There are two possible interpretations for a result like this: a) the study did not use tools precise enough to accurately discern the correct phylogeny; or b) the groups are not well differentiated enough to be considered separate taxonomic units. Which one you choose is, again, a subjective choice. Automatically lumping everything under the oldest name is the lazy approach.

I would also caution that DNA is not a miracle. In the 70s, when isozymes and cladistics were all the hotness, many taxonomists saw these as being the ultimate truth and published classifications to match. Then sanger, single gene sequencing came along and showed us that a different system of classifying information following their probable evolutionary history existed. Then we got next-gen sequencing and found different results. When the next hot technology comes along (machine-learning blockchains analyzing whole-genome sequences? :rofl:) it may well spur another effort at re-classifying. The fundamental choice of where you put that line remains subjective. We are also trying to fit a linear bifurcating model (phylogeny) to a system that, with plants at least, is probably better understood as a network model (many plants readily form viable hybrids that backcross with parents, and enable gene flow between lineages long after they might have otherwise be considered to have diverged),

Meanwhile higher-level taxonomies remain an artificial classification we use to satisfy our human need to put things into boxes and label them. And who determines that a system based on single gene sequencing, or next-gen, or whatever technique you apply is better than one based on what we can see with our eyes? People still want names for plants an animals, and would rather not say: “Hey, did you see that OTU112 from Bloggs et al 2017 back there?”

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I liken it to wanting to divide a pie equally between two people. You can cut it down the middle, but one piece will almost always be bigger than the other. To make it fairer, you can cut the halves again, and apportion them out randomly, but the chances are still likely to be one gets more than the other. So we halve the quarters, and so on until an infinite number of bifurcations and random distribution gives us the desired result of equal shares. But that would take an infinite amount of time to do, so they both end up with no pie :(

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Is there a way to take a look somewhere at the mentioned taxonomic changes or one only has to buy their books?

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AFAIK all the new combinations are listed individually in IPNI. From the snippets I’ve looked at on Google Books, the rationale for circumscribing a given genus is usually pretty sparse (typically a few sentences) and the work is mostly given over to formalizing new combinations. But I haven’t seen the whole thing, so I may be misrepresenting it.

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This link to the GLOVAP publication record in IPNI lists (in pages) the (currently) 3710 names incorporated by IPNI:
https://www.ipni.org/p/20022878-2

There are some sorting options over on the right side of the page.

You can also use their “standard form” of the publication name ( Global Fl. - punctuation required) as part of their Advanced Search options to filter by Family, Genus, etc. For example, all new Cyatheaceae names included in their publication are listed with this URL (couldn’t spell it out here because the punctuation gets misinterpreted by Discourse (this forum’s software).

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Thank you

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If there is someone who has had the chance to read their books, I would like to know which is the rationale beyond these changes. Phylogenetic data? Both phylogeny and morphology? Something else?

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When I have time, I can provide counterexamples, where taxonomic evidence is adequate to justify new combinations, yet the specialist researchers for one or another reason delay even decades to provide these. So I cannot fault GLOVAP. There are indeed taxonomic ambulance chasers, but it seems to me that GLOVAP was motivated not by opportunism, but simply to validate the names necessary for their global plant taxonomy. This effort itself merits appreciation. No two floristic taxonomies are ever the same, so they cannot be faulted simply for discrepancies. And we cannot simply go on forever wringing our hands about lacki of definitive evidence, this will NEVER change, and it is only ONE of the reasons for taxonomic discrepancies, the other more important ones being philosphical and paradigmatic. iNaturalist itself professes to be a global taxonomic reference. My guess is that, for plants, GLOVAP taxonomists are more broadly knowledgeable and qualified than the iNaturalist team. I add this that what is “highly contested” are NOT the combinations themselves, but for violating “taxonomic territoriality” and “stealing the thunder” from mostly younger publishers of the molecular research. A red herring. If said researchers intended to publish the combinations, they had every opportunity to do so. And the truth is, there really is no “thunder” in nomenclatural papers.

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Hi, welcome to iNaturalist and the iNat Forum. The iNaturalist staff acknowledge its database is far, far from complete and I would be surprised to hear them refer to it as a reference for taxonomy. I think you might be referring to how we (iNaturalist staff and volunteer curators), prefer to use global external references, like Clements for birds, rather than say, splicing together species checklists of Birds of North America, Birds of South America, Birds of Australia, etc. You can read more about taxonomy on iNaturalist here: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/curator+guide#policies

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Can we also get updates on water invertebrates, using something like Worms website taxonomy (I don’t know where it takes it from), cause those species are poorly presented on iNat and it seems we miss thousands of them?

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I think what was most highly contested was that the publication lacked external peer review. From the ASPT letter linked in the original post (above):

The overarching concern is that GLOVAP is a fundamental deviation from the way that we as a scientific community conduct our research, collaborate and respect each other as colleagues, and publish our results through a peer-review process.

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fundamental deviation from the way that we as a scientific community conduct our research, collaborate and respect each other as colleagues, and publish our results through a peer-review process.

SORRY, but this is Bos taurus, for many reasons.

Good thing Darwin and Newton and Aristotle did not publish their results through a “peer review process,” as their conclusions were sufficiently contentious to have been rejected.

There are no shortage of “peer reviewed” (pal reviewed) papers that are Bos taurus. Especially, in the case of biodiversity papers, in the journals Nature and Science. Their rapid review process may be fine for exact science and results of clinical trials, but not at all for the complex biodiversity disciplines, where there are no robust methods or laws.

Your posture seems to advocate “group think.” As General Patton famously said, “if everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.” A very important point in science, which advances ONLY because someone thinks differently.

Then other more serious problem, of course, is that this platitude seems no more or less than the implementation of a sort of Marxist politics in science. Because “peers” almost invariably technically are state workers, generally hired for reasons other than their true scientific prowess, e.g., political connections, entrepreneurial skills, political beliefs, etc.

But the danger is evident even in a technically non-Marxist context. One cannot succeed in Japanese academics if one publically questions that country’s policy that claims that commercial whale harvesting is for “scientific research purposes.” I searched at one point for a Japan-based scientist criticizing this policy. I found none. And I searched for NON-Japan based scientists SUPPORTING Japan’s policy. I found ONE. In Norway. A country that has the SAME policy as Japan.

Back to GLOVAP, this “peer review” thing is not only bad science policy, it is a RED HERRING. GLOVAP upset researchers NOT because the recombinations were WRONG, but because they were largely CORRECT. After all, nobody is obliged to follow GLOVAP taxonomy. And the truth is, competing scientists PREFER that their competitors are wrong.

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You are correct, it does not profess to be a taxonomic reference, yet cannot help but be one, simply by its very implementation. Indeed, ALL general taxonomic references throughout history have functioned the same, i.e., emphasizing certain secondary sources which, in turn, usually base on tertiary or more removed original sources. The taxonomy in databases like iNat eventually incarnate as general references, simply because they are consulted as such. I know this because, in 1997, I was a curator of organismal taxonomy at GenBank, responsible for the taxonomy of plants, Mycota, and all metazoans except Diptera. Well, that is quite a spread. God himself could not be an expert on all of this. In fact, as suggested in Genesis 2: 20, THIS is the reason that God created man. To name and classify all the beasts He created. This woman and sex thing, that was an afterthought. Just to reproduce and make more taxonomists. Probable why Cain killed Abel. To steal his recombinations. In any case, as a specialist myself, I am familiar with the taxonomy of “my” organisms in general references, both current and some interesting ones commonly sold in the early 19th century. Fascinating theme.

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