There’s a lot of disagreement in Louisiana/Mississippi about how to identify Lampropeltis holbrooki and L. nigra. There’s essentially two different viewpoints of identifiers: ID based on range (east or west of the Mississippi River) and ID based on appearance (whether or not an individual looks spe…

iNat is a great place for taxonomic discussions! Everyone is free to ID as they see things, and where there is a difference of opinion it can be very enlightening to discuss why we take our respective positions, and often new information is presented that can shift your point of view! So my advice o…

iNat is certainly a great place for taxonomic discussions. But the guidelines are pretty clear that identifications are not the place for taxonomic disagreement. Under the iNat taxonomy, Lampropeltis nigra explicitly refers to snakes east of the river, and L. holbrooki explicitly refers to snakes w…

My understanding is that the taxonomic tree used in iNat is a determined thing, but as far as what observations are identified as, it is a concensus of what IDs are applied by all identifiers. We can all put different (valid within iNat) IDs and yet none of us could be putting what the system takes …

There’s a FAQ item that addresses this issue. It doesn’t explicitly mention range, but it was added to the FAQ based on a very similar case: contentious snake identifications related to taxonomy/range/a swimmable boundary—in that case, Pantherophis alleghaniensis/P. spiloides, which also spurred the…

subspecies that potentialy intergrade and are very closely related are in my mind very different from two species that occur on different continents. It’s a balance and we have to use location a lot, but i can’t see any point in classifying subspecies by location, especially if they occur near each …

agree: it needs a new thread. But briefly. You would be correct if identifying by subspecies only was the final point. The reality is that most subspecies do have features assisting ID, and the geographical ID is an interim step, like classifying unidentified observations as “plants”. Once cate…

ok, i moved it to a new thread. People do this all the time, and it annoys me, i don’t usually bother asking people not t od o it elsewhere and there’s no clearr iNat policy i know of but i won’t agree with subspecies IDs on my own observations without a visible feature, except in rare cases (like …

This is a tough one, because though it seems clear from this discussion that there is a “right answer” on what should be done on iNaturalist (use the secondary authority – the Reptile Database – and thus use the river boundary), the people who strongly disagree with the secondary authority on this p…

i don’t think trusting a reptile database over field data is a slam dunk choice at all. The point of iNat (among other things) is to document biodiversity, but if you can’t tell a species or subspecies by the photo but are identifying as such anyway, why not just add a casual observation without a p…

I dunno… we have two spider species that look almost identical, at least to the point that I could not tell from a typical photo which is which. One we have in the North Island, the other in the South Island, seperated by the Cook Straight. The first is Lampona murina and the other is Lampona cylind…

ID Based on Range or Appearance

General

Topic		Replies	Views
Etiquette for ID of species with no visual differences General identification , etiquette	157	8657	January 23, 2020
Choosing not to identify subspecies General	44	5126	March 26, 2019
Identifying birds to subspecies without field marks Nature Talk	25	2036	May 9, 2019
Identifying based on location General question , id , identification , etiquette , location , out-of-range-species	47	956	June 3, 2026
Question Regarding Subspecies Identification General question	25	1997	February 6, 2023

ID Based on Range or Appearance

Related topics