Millipedes are vastly more under-surveyed than birds, so I’d even be cautious about making the assumption that millipede Species A, which is only documented from, say, North Carolina and Connecticut, could never show up in rural Pennsylvania. A friend of mine is an expert in native bees. When he and several other people were doing the research for a paper on the bee fauna of Massachusetts, they were often out in the field trying to find bees that just hadn’t been documented for that state or even neighboring states.
(And I’m so glad to hear Thayer’s and Iceland Gulls have been lumped - trying to identify Thayer’s Gulls 30-40 years ago was a pain, back when I was into birds.)
Another perpetual issue with under-surveyed arthropods is that what has and hasn’t been documented in a given state is often not easily accessible information. If you want to know whether a Whiskered Tern has ever shown up in Virginia, you can find that information online with a few searches. If you want to know whether Chionodes gilvomaculella is known from Connecticut, good luck. The online sources people generally use like iNat, BugGuide, etc. usually lack robust numbers of records of these small obscure arthropods, and most states/provinces don’t have “official” lists of what tiny beetles or moths occur there. So the only way to know if a given oddball taxon is known from a place is to search through institutional collections in-person or dig through niche print literature that probably hasn’t been read since the year it was printed. “First record I can find online for my state” and “actual first known record for the state” are vastly different things for these. It sometimes feels like the online naturalist community is “re-discovering” species that some old guy at a natural history museum has always known was there, but which the collective Internet wasn’t aware of. I’m glad this data is slowly becoming more open and accessible though. When I think of some of the old-timers we’ve lost who had unimaginable amounts of knowledge along the lines of “that particular log that has a species in it known from only 6 specimens globally”, it’s tragic to consider how much unpublished data passes away with each generation of naturalists.
Наука не так работает. Периодически издаются аннотированные списки видов, составители которых учитывают все доступные публикации.
Да, далеко не всегда они существуют в удобной онлайн форме, чаще в виде бумажных книг. И там отмечают и предположительно исчезнувшие виды, если их какой-то период не находили.
Regarding IDing subspecies based on location: this was already discussed somewhat above. I agree that using location alone (rather than identifying characteristics) to ID to subspecies is not a good idea. Maybe it’s fine if you are at a spot well within the range of a subspecies, but sometimes that can fail also, unless you can actually see characteristics of that form:
I’ve seen too many range maps with highly variable subspecies ranges to really trust them. And of course if there is a broad intergrade zone and you’re in it, it’s best to leave the taxon at species level.
For the very specific nature of a percentage of my identifications I use location as supporting evidence for identification. This is entirely in regard to plants, and more specifically a non-native species and its hybrid offspring!
Speaking from the iNat end, “couldn’t get past people’s personal sensitivities about having confidence scores potentially assigned to their IDs” has never really been a consideration when it comes to weighing a potential confidence metric. It’s just significantly simpler to ask people to ID to the taxonomic level they believe the evidence supports. They can add context via a comment, and anyone can vote in the Data Quality Assessment as to whether they think the ID can be refined or not.
I spent a while trying to identify one centipede from my backyard which looked pretty distinctive. I found a good match with a common European species, but I couldn’t find any information about it being in North America and couldn’t be confident with the ID since I didn’t confirm with a microscope. Finally I came across an old academic paper which listed the same species as having been documented in the same general area as me, after which I was comfortable identifying my observations. But those old papers are so tedious to find access for, and to read once you do have access to them…
I deal with this kind of thing on an almost daily basis. Trying to sort out vague location references, confirming dates that don’t appear to make sense, etc.
I wish I had started doing the work I’m doing now 10 years ago. Or that someone else had started even earlier.