Lumping Impossible/Hard to ID species

A sane principle… unless these herbaria specimens are also types :laughing:

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True. If it’s a type, the question becomes, “What does this name really mean?”

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Coleus madagascariensis.
Doesn’t come from Madagascar.
Is not found in Madagascar.
The binomial is a label for box, like a QR or bar code. Or an accession number?
It means this because they say it does.
I ID because I know what that particular ‘box’ looks like.

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yeah, people complain about data quality on iNat but don’t realize it’s that way in more ‘fancy’ scientific settings too. Everything is full of errors, and taxonomy is also subjective and full of errors. We just do the best we can.

I’m frustrated today because I’d identified some things to Mimulus guttatus in the past, but now that species has been split into a bunch of smaller species and apparently no species group was created when the split occurred so mine are all still identified as Guttatus and many are wrong.

To be honest, the way taxonomy works on iNat and the greater field now, i stopped doing 99% of my IDs for others.

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The question becomes “Is anything else that says it’s this really what it says it is!?”

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