How to handle an apparent "nomen nudum" in iNat's taxonomy?

Curators
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I’ve been trying to track down the origin of the taxon “Petrophila sanramon” which appears in iNat’s taxonomy but almost nowhere else. I flagged the taxon and contacted other moth experts directly. The comments on the flag can be read here. The name seems to have been added to iNat without a formal basis. As of this date, there are 39 observations of “Petrophila sanramon” on iNat; they appear to be a collection of at least two or three different neotropical Petrophila’s. BOLD has a provisional taxon “Petrophila sanramonEPR02” for a set of about a dozen barcoded specimens. My suspicion is that someone translated that provisional taxon into a formal name on iNaturalist–an inappropriate extrapolation.

So what’s next? I expect this should involve a taxon swap or merge to eliminate “Petrophila sanramon” from the database and summarily move all of its observations to genus level. Absent any formal documentation of the origin of the name, is that the appropriate next step?

p.s. I don’t attempt taxon swaps or merges since I have proven myself to be quite clumsy at such tasks. I’ll have to leave this to others.

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Here are some previous discussions:

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/nomen-dubium-nomen-nudum-etc-what-are-the-rules-for-inat/53487

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/authoritative-taxonomy-source-s-for-marine-organisms/59709/3

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Consider adding an observation field to provide an easy way to group these observations when a name is eventually established?

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I just went through the entire set of 39 observations bearing the name “Petrophila sanramon”. The set of observations is actually a mash-up of at least 4 other Neotropical Petrophila’s. A few of them were identifiable as other species such as P. auspicatalis and P. darsanialis (yet to be added to iNat’s taxonomy). I backed all the others up to genus level for the time being since I cannot put species names to the diverse array.
That still leaves the presence of “Petrophila sanramon” in iNat’s taxonomy without a resolution.

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Since the name is not valid and seems to have no taxonomic basis, I think the best solution is to just set the taxon to Inactive in iNaturalist.

One could also swap it into the genus Petrophila, so that if anyone tried to look up the name, the equivalent in iNaturalist would be the genus ID. That might be a helpful solution since the name is found in an external reference, but it also means that we are perpetuating an invalid name in iNaturalist synonymy, which I try not to do in other situations.

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