Issues when a suggestion is made that a species is the same as another species

Campanella gregaria was described as a new species from Western Australia by Bougher (2007) but Bougher (2017) suggested that it was possibly the same as Resupinatus merulioides (a species described by Redhead & Nagas (1987) from Japan); but this was awaiting confirmation. As far as I can determine, this has not yet been confirmed. In iNaturalist, some occurrences from Australia are listed as Campanella gregaria and others as Resupinatus merulioides but I think they should all be listed as Campanella gregaria until there is published information that they are identical to Resupinatus merulioides. For this reason, I changed the ID of my observation from Resupinatus merulioides to Campanella gregaria. As a result, I lost the research grade on my observation, and it was downgraded to Suborder Marasmiineae!

References:
Bougher, NL, 2007: The genus Campanella in Western Australia, Mycotaxon v.99, p. 327–335.

Bougher, NL, 2017: Fungi of the Perth region and beyond: a self-managed field book, Western Australian Naturalists’ Club (Inc.) Perth, Western Australia.

Redhead, SA and Nagasawa, E, 1987: Resinomycena japonica and Resupinatus merulioides, new species of Agaricales from Japan, Canadian Journal of Botany, v.65, p. 972–976.

You can “opt out of Community Taxon” for these observations.

For instance, for this observation, I can force the Community Taxon to be “Animalia” instead of “State of matter Life”, so that the ID “Euphorbia hirta” from the identifier is ignored:

Please do it from the observation page.
Do it only for your observations of Campanella gregaria.

Don’t do it for all your observations, from your profile page.

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Or you can make this argument to the identifiers who are disagreeing with you and challenge them to cite the published source for the synonymy.

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You should create a taxon flag to discuss IDs with other users. You may even want a curator to make a swap to collect the observations under one name.

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I think the reason this hasn’t been done is because it is too soon:

We should be conservative about making taxon changes that have not yet been confirmed in the literature.

Thanks Thomas. I was not aware that you could create a taxon flag but I have done that now