How exhausting plant taxonomy curation has become

[upupa-epops]

@zygy

The main goal should be having an easy to manage taxonomy, not having a cutting edge or “scientifically correct” taxonomy (as there is no such thing).

This is something I keep running into and it’s not clear to me if there’s a formal priority when these conflict. There seem to be many cases where old resolutions have been found to be non-monophyletic, but taxonomists are still working towards a new formal revision. At higher levels the old version is maintained for stability, but at lower levels monophyly seems to take priority a lot more. Although I think the Curator Guide only explicitly requires monophyly for complexes.

@upupa-epops

@trscavo

Does iNat allow infrageneric subdivision based on morphology alone?

Personally I’d prefer using whatever taxonomy there is that covers an entire genus even if it’s old and morphology-based, but a lot of curators will disagree. If the last revision of the entire genus was in 1849 and it’s a well known genus, it’s possible that phylogenetics has messed up the old morphology-based taxonomy, and most curators will want to follow the phylogenetics. That’s been the main hindrance for some genera (e.g. Cladonia, Potentilla) where the phylogenetic work has been fairly recent and hasn’t reached a formalized resolution yet.