How to "fix" a checklist for an out-of-date family?

Curators
1

I’m trying to “fix” various county-level checklists that appear to be contributing to inaccurate distribution maps for a particular California native plant: Triteleia lugens. As background, I should say that I have:

  1. Reviewed all observations of T. lugens on iNat (95 RG plus another 5 that need more consensus)
  2. Reviewed all observations of related species that may have been misidentified (about 1300; there really shouldn’t be any T. lugens hidden elsewhere at this point)
  3. Reviewed all the literature I can find on this taxon. There’s a summary in the comment to the atlas entry.
  4. Reviewed all the reported observations of T. lugens on the Calflora database
  5. Created an atlas entry for T. lugens with just the six counties of known distribution (per Lenz) selected.

Even though I only selected six counties in the atlas, the map on the taxon page for T. lugens shows 14 counties as shaded:

  • 2 counties are shaded green. These have RG observations and are among the 6 counties I selected in the atlas.
  • 2 of the 12 brown-shaded counties are in the atlas but have no RG observations, so that’s as expected.
  • 2 of the 12 brown-shaded counties are in the atlas and DO HAVE RG observations. It has been explained to me that may be happening because this taxon is set to obscure locations and there are no observations with obscuring boxes that are fully inside the borders of those counties. I guess that makes some sense.
  • 8 other counties are shaded brown, have no observations and are not in the atlas. I has been suggested that these may be showing up because the species appears on a checklist for that county.

To fix this issue, I am attempting to manually edit these county-level checklists to set the Occurrence Status for this species to “Absent”. For example, here’s the species’ entry for T. lugens on the Themidaceae of El Dorado County, CA, US checklist. However, when I attempt to change the occurrence status, I get this message: “There were problems updating that listed taxon: Coast Range triteleia (Triteleia lugens) is not in taxon Family Themidaceae”

That does make sense, because while the Jepson eFlora and phylogenetic work on Triteleia laxa places it within Themidaceae, APG III and IV collapse all the Themidaceae genera into Asparagaceae.

But I’m lost as to how I can resolve this. It seems I can’t make changes to the Themidaceae checklists, but they’re still generating incorrect distributions on taxon maps. BTW, there is also a checklist for Asparagaceae of El Dorado County, CA, US, but it only contains two Maianthemum species, so that’s not the cause of the phantom brown-shaded counties.

Help!

1 Like
2

OK, I tried something different.

  1. I went to the overall checklist of Themidaceae of El Dorado County, CA, US.
  2. I clicked Edit Taxa, which put the checklist in batch edit mode.
  3. I clicked Remove next to Triteleia lugens and then OK to approve.

However, this also seems not to remove the taxon from the checklist.

Ideas?

4

I think what you can do is the following.

  • open the checklist record in edit mode, and then in the source at the bottom, click edit source, and then delete it
  • when you get back to the checklist, click the edit taxa button, find the species and then use the remove link. To add to the fun of this, there is no sort or search function, so on long lists you just have to scroll page by page until you find it.

That allowed me to remove the record from the El Dorado checklist. I dont know the other counties you are referencing, but try that.

1 Like
5

That’s great! That worked and there’s really no way I would have found that on my own. Thanks very much @cmcheatle. Now I can work on some cleanup!