It is great how at least for some organisms, there’s an international, consensual taxonomic database able to function as a reference, and able to please taxonomists and amateurs alike. 
The grievance about taxonomic instabilities might stem more from groups whereby the situation is less idyllic; one of iNat’s weaknesses is a limited support for synonymy and parataxonomies (edit: see e.g. the post above mine), whenever consensus is less strong or reference databases have shortcomings.
In some ways, yes, because I have learned not to “waste” time as a curator on taxa with 0 observations. It’s not hurting anyone to leave it alone if no one is posting them.
I don’t think these criteria quite get at the heart of the problem. It’s worth looking at the list of all taxonomic changes committed to see how much curatorial activity is occurring, and largely unnoticed–it would be a bad idea to suddenly cut that off.
Most of the controversy I have seen revolves around vascular plant taxonomy, which is in a peculiar position. We have some taxa, particularly vertebrate orders, where there is a centralized external authority, down to species level, that updates on a regular schedule, which we usually follow very exactly. We have other groups (many invertebrates, fungi) where there is very little central authority, and the tree is evidently kept up by knowledgeable curators engaging with the literature.
Vascular plants are in a weird place. Right now, we have 16,776 “relationship unknown” taxa in vascular plants, which sounds terrible when contrasted with the 15,550 total taxon relationships for reptiles…but we have 288,718 taxon relationships for vascular plants, so that’s about 0.5% of the total.
We theoretically have a big central database in the form of POWO…but botanists (on and off iNat) don’t regard it as wholly definitive in quite the same way we treat the Clements checklist for birds. They take a very conservative approach to recognizing infraspecific taxa, among other things, and they’re probably also understaffed relative to the volume of taxonomic decisions they have to make. When we have a missing relationship, sometimes that does indicate that POWO got it right and we should be rearranging our taxonomy. However, sometimes it’s POWO that’s overlooked a piece of literature and needs to be updated, which they are good about doing, once it’s brought to their attention by correspondence.
Unfortunately, we have multiple curators who appear to be barreling along trying to “fix” the unknown relationships by setting up and executing swaps without any knowledge of the taxa involved and the relevant literature, and who are blowing off polite feedback suggesting that they wait before committing them. This is basically what’s called a scream test in IT, except that curators don’t actually have a way to reverse changes once they’ve committed them.
To be frank, I don’t think there’s a huge amount of low-hanging fruit in those ~17,000 unknown relationships. Curators have been working over our vascular plant taxonomy for years; when we see an unknown relationship there, that now suggests that there’s some underlying controversy or disagreement, rather than lack of attention. I think we should amend the curator guide to tell curators not to make taxon changes solely on the basis of aligning with POWO; there should be some sort of additional literature supplied to show that the problem really is on our end instead of in POWO.
Sorry, where can you see those 16K unknowns, on the suggested pages there is nothing https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_framework_relationships/365465 I can see
Click on the link ‘View taxonomy details’, “Relationship unknown count: 16795” appears.
Is there a way to browse taxon flags and see if there are any that one can address? I have been thinking of applying for curator, but I would first need to propose a taxon change that I want to make. If resolving existing flags can meet this requirement, that would be great, but I would need to find out which flags I can potentially resolve.
Example: Any taxon flag for Passifloreae (already resolved or not)
Thanks, It seems there are many with no observations, hybrid formulas, varieties that are cultivars, strait forward orthographic variants and incomplete splits or lumps where some are in one genus and some left behind in the other, so there is still a lot of low hanging fruit which I would not think controversial.
edit: Oops, sorry, didn’t know it was against the Forum Rules to link to a very good and informative debate between curators under a flag. Too bad, the arguments were excellent and conversation extremely polite, but hey.
We have a single not very active curator here on the island with 2000 endemic plant species and even more endemic invertebrates. So for most endemics we depend on taxon swaps and taxon additions from people who never observed these taxa themselves. Does remind a little of the old colonial period, i know…
I’d rather taxon swaps just took multiple people’s input to approve.
Just noting that we started an experiment for vascular plant curation that involves a waiting period. It won’t fix everything, but it will be interesting to see how it goes.
I disagree, it hurts the credibility of iNat as a database.
Of course, it may not be possible due to the time it takes (I’m not doing every swap for fishes for instance), but the goal should be to have everything up-to-date.
Being a taxonomic database is not one of iNat’s primary goals (as staff have attested). If people are treating iNat as such, that is their problem, not iNat’s.
And also the problem of those who interact with them. We’ve already had at least one member leave the Forum because of conflict with people who treat iNat as a taxonomic database.
The conversation seems to have turned a corner, so i’m responding to the issue raised here, then seems reflected in the last replies above this. Meanwhile we wait to see on “the experiment”.
To my mind, the central decision to test a new approach is defensible and interesting. I am however concerned about the idea to add delay and limits at this end for issues that already seem to hit against delays and limits externally. Rather, i see that POWO (and linked databases) have tried to do too much too soon. So yes - the presented scheme of POWO etc should be viewed with caution. However, i’d instead like to see the force of experience of iNat users being used to help effectively drive resolution of issues about divergent taxonomy rather than (for example) waiting in hope that someone elsewhere externally will make some informed decision, then to be reflected. Here, I see some useful steps about “how” the concerns raised at the iNat end should be communicated with the various botany databases, but all could be implemented with much better connectance.
In last comments, i see (cthawley) say “Being a taxonomic database is not one of iNat’s primary goals”. Well i’m sorry, but to my eye, the very fundamentals of this website are biological taxonomy. If it needs stated then the mission is “to connect people to nature and advance biodiversity science and conservation”. If biological taxonomy isn’t at the core of biodiversity science and the framework being used for conservation and informing people about what they’re seeing, then i’ve been doing it wrong for the last 30 years. As for many of you, i’ve also seen countless initiatives from biologists “to recognise” or “to catalog Earth’s biodiversity” all come and go, usually failing once funding cycles end. However, the vast number of users who want to document the nature they find is testament to the cause. This initiative at iNat however seems to continue strongly each year. Hence, i’ve got hope that such lofty goals can be achieved. However, if iNat is going to start ignoring, omitting or just enforcing needless delays on its reflection of the framework provided by advances in our modern understanding of biological taxonomy, well, that’s a very tough idea to convince me on!
As I mentioned earlier, “We’ve already had at least one member leave the Forum because of conflict with people who treat iNat as a taxonomic database.” There have been other comments scattered through various threads about observers being on the recieving end of academic arrogance and disdain. So clearly there is a problem with expectations; with individuals “in the know” about taxonomy who seem to believe that iNaturalist exists to be their taxonomic database, and don’t you dare contaminate it with laypersons’ misconceptions.
It is relevant to mention here the discussions that my local Sierra Club group has had in planning this year’s Earth Day event: “We shouldn’t communicate like the educated elite.” If we’re trying to garner interest among the general public, then we have to frame our message in ways that can resonate with the general public.
There are subtle but important differences between ‘wanting to have an accurate taxonomy to provide to the users of the platform’, vs. ‘trying to be a leader in producing a comprehensive taxonomy of life on Earth’. The former is about providing the minimum necessary infrastructure to support a project based around biodiversity. The latter is a much more ambitious goal which would require a lot more investment.
It’s possible that iNat is the best-placed organization to pull off the latter goal, or that it’s de facto almost doing it already, so I get the desire to formalize that. But actually committing to that kind of goal would be a huge undertaking that would take resources from the other valuable and productive commitments going on. As it is, there are compromises that need to be made between staying on the forefront of taxonomic advances and maintaining a stable taxonomy that’s useful for the practical purposes of the platform. Keeping progress slow is generally helpful for stability.
I’m going to try to wake this thread again. Dangerous move.
My view is this. Stability isn’t best served by being slow to adopt, it’s better served by something very much inline - being cautious to favour adoption more defensible viewpoints.
Any ideal of ‘accurate taxonomy’ seems meanless to me, it’s something always in flux and subjective, but being a leader in comprehensive taxonomy is a goal that i can see many more supporting. Why are we all willing to belittle and downplay the awesome support and drives we’ve got here for such an important task? I’m failing to see what further investment would be needed that isn’t already here, i.e. as a massive community of deeply interested people who could unify behind such a goal. I get that taxonomic nuances are subjective and there’s often some infighting, but if you want to state your counter-view to something taxonomic, then do so in the academic literature, and ideally do so with an evidence based review on whatever taxon issue you dispute, or get out of dodge.
Above, @ jasonhernandez74 mentioned ““We’ve already had at least one member leave the Forum”. Well ok, anyone leaving is a poor thing, and we all should be mindful of negative feelings from anyone, and listen to what pushes any away who were former allies. But that said, i’m sorry, if you think any strategy or initiative can please everyone, then that sounds miraculous. Some of course will view anything academic with distain, and i find that awful. Should the dissenting view of one person with a mindset like that then drive consensus of others? I think no, but i hope the iNat team are willing to view what the actual concerns of such people are.
[Note, minor subsequent edits above for spelling and clarity, June 2025]
Vertebrates have relatively low diversity and high interest, so there are generally good comprehensive taxonomic resources that we can refer to that have been hashed out pretty thoroughly. With plants on the other hand we have very high diversity and variable levels of interest. For any particular species there may only be a couple people who care about it, and they might disagree about its taxonomic position, and then you have a stalemate that needs to be refereed by someone else with less relevant expertise. With highly diverse groups there is the potential for innumerable conflicts like that, which distract from the more direct goals of the platform.
iNat tries to limit those, and make the refereeing easier, by only covering species that have been observed on iNat, and by deferring to POWO. Making iNat into its own authoritative taxonomy would involve releasing those limitations, requiring a greater level of oversight and responsibility.
POWO is only trying to cover the 400,000 described vascular plant species. Currently only 500,000 species have been observed of all taxa in iNat (I’m not sure how to get numbers for how many are included in iNat’s taxonomy in total). A comprehensive taxonomy of all described species on Earth would be attempting to cover about 2 million species. That’s a huge scale increase over what iNat or POWO are currently doing.