I’ve been curating Anemone (the plant) identifications, and have noticed many of my ID’s have been withdrawn (I played no part in it). Here’s an example.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/21056702
I had bumped this down to genus because the species ID was incorrect. Am I going to have to go back and redo all my identifications now? Is this a glitch or mistake of some kind?
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It was an intentional taxon change, not a glitch. The older concept of “Anemone” included other genera like Hepatica. If you click the link where it says “Added as part of a taxon split” you can see more details as to why the change was made: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes/55691
You can review some of these IDs via a search like this: https://www.inaturalist.org/identifications?taxon_id=51242¤t=false&user_id=pfau_tarleton
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So, seriously, I literally have to go back to all of those and re-enter my identification to bump them back down to genus???
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Shouldn’t the explicit disagreement have carried over to the new taxon, at least?
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Yes, that’s the glitch part of my post. Thanks for using the proper words.
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But since both people in the example https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/21056702 had agreed that the observation was in the genus Anemone (as previously defined), then shouldn’t both identifications be bumped to Tribe Anemoneae, instead of just one of them? That way the first ID wouldn’t look unchallenged the way it does now.
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It makes sense to me that the many hours of my time should somehow be preserved so that I don’t have to start from scratch correcting the identifications. I’ve done hundreds of these…and now I have to start over from the beginning.
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There are two concepts of the genus Anemone presented in the taxon split:
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Old, broad concept of the genus: Anemone sensu lato (taxon #51242): This is now an inactive taxon and will not count toward the community taxon calculation. This inactive taxon included species like pasqueflowers (A. nuttaliana), hepaticas (A. americana), wood anemones (A. quinquefolia). It and all its descendant taxa are now inactive, and the IDs have been transferred to other genera, including:
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New, narrow concept of the genus: Anemone sensu stricto (taxon #883652): excludes those species above; only includes the species listed at the taxon page, including A. caroliniana. The genera Anemonastrum, Anemonoides, Eriocapitella, Hepatica, Knowltonia, and Pulsatilla are considered separate from the sensu stricto genus Anemone.
When looking at the example:
ID1: Anemone caroliniana
ID2, Russell’s: Anemone (genus), old sensu lato version of Anemone, explicit disagreement w/ A.caroliniana
When the taxon split commits, if no atlases are created, or where range maps overlap, the IDs are reassigned to the common ancestor, in this case the tribe Anemoneae.
The system knows Russell is saying that it’s definitely not A. caroliniana. But once the taxon split goes through, it’s not possible for it to know which of the “new” genera that he meant. Transferring the explicit disagreement to the tribe would be wrong, because that would be saying he disagrees it’s in the genus Anemone too. Related are the pending(?) changes to branch disagreements, discussed here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/25514-clarifying-ancestor-disagreements
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/change-wording-used-by-the-system-when-downgrading-an-observation-to-an-higher-level-taxa/3862/119
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Can the explicit disagreement be reinstated then? That’s the main problem here.
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When the taxon split bumps up to common ancestor, users are required to add IDs to specify which output taxon they intended. So adding an Anemone sensu stricto genus ID + explicit disagreement is the way to go – that’s the way to reinstate the disagreement.
It also may help to think of this situation with a different output genus in mind.
ID1: Anemone americana
ID2: Anemone (genus, sensu lato), disagreeing with A. americana b/c, say, the photos don’t show enough details to distinguish from A. acutiloba
----species taxon change and genus taxon split-----
ID1: A. americana --> Hepatica americana
ID2: Anemone sensu lato —> tribe Anemoneae
Now IDer 2 must add their new ID, Hepatica (genus) + explicit disagreement with H. americana.
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I think I understand the predicament. And this is the most efficient way for me to go back and redo these? Going down the list from the link above and opening each observation in a new browser tab?
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If you check the right “column”, you can just focus on the IDs that were actually disagreements.
I thought that clicking “Update Your Content” on a taxon change would help find these types of observations, but for me there are no observations or IDs listed there: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes/55691/commit_for_user (scroll down)
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Is there a code I can use to have it show me only the one’s that I haven’t fixed yet? Otherwise, if I just fix a few and come back later, I have to remember where I left off and scroll past those to get to the new ones.
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No, there’s not a way to do that that I’m aware of. It looks like there are just a few dozen of these rather than hundreds, at least!
Since this isn’t a bug from what I can tell, I’m going to close this bug report. There’re definitely some improvements that could be made for helping manage your content around disruptive taxon splits, so it might be worth opening a feature request or brainstorm ideas in #general.