Continuing the discussion from Why identifying ‘by range’ is a problem :
I can’t speak for plants, but for moths, if range were ignored when making IDs, it’s not an exaggeration to say that many if not most of the moths on inat should not be ID’d to the species level. Name virtually any moth species in your area, and a cryptic species that looks identical to it in photos very well may exist somewhere else in the world. Even big “obvious” ones like the silk and sphinx moths- luna moths and Mexican moon moths are basically identical except for size, the Syssphinx spp in Arizona/west Mexico each have a virtually identical sister species in TX/east Mexico, the big obvious Manduca in temperate North America are pretty much identical to tropical congeners… and the little brown ones are even worse. The common Nearctic “armyworm moth” is identical to a load of other Mythimna from Asia and Australia, the Lucerne moth of America and the Rush Veneer of Europe are essentially identical… the corn earworm has eastern and western hemisphere cryptic species, etc., etc… of course they all differ by DNA and ecology and genitalia; but if all you have is a single snapshot of a live moth, you can’t consider any of those factors. When identifying any of these past genus, the only factor that can possibly allow for a species ID is the location the moth was observed. It’s pretty much the central conceit of any attempts to identify moths from live photographs- that cryptic species found in other parts of the world are eliminated based on location. If you take that away, the whole idea of live moth photograph ID becomes virtually impossible in many cases.
There absolutely are hitchhikers and new invasions of introduced species that occur, but in cases when a cryptic species appears in a new part of the world, the only way to even know this is happening is to be taking DNA samples and/or dissecting specimens to detect the new introduction. See, for example, the 2013 paper “Shared but overlooked: 30 species of Holarctic Microlepidoptera revealed by DNA barcodes and morphology”, which added 30 species to the North American fauna that had been overlooked due to confusion with their externally-identical congeners.
So yes, I will continue to disagree with IDs of wildly-out-of-range species that hypothetically could be correct were it not for the range. Because if known ranges can’t be considered when making IDs, we should be putting many more of our live moth photos at the genus level, at best. I’ll start by kicking the 45,000 Luna moth observations back to genus Actias with the comment “A 2,000+ mile out-of-range Actias truncatipennis cannot technically be ruled out based on this photo.” /s
I stand by this statement, and to echo what others have said, it’s a nuanced question without a black-and-white answer. Ignore ranges entirely, and virtually nothing is identifiable to species. Rely too dogmatically on published ranges, and you’ll never find anything new and unexpected. Neither of those takes is helpful, but everyone has their own line as to where to draw the line between them.