More on species complexes

[upupa-epops]

For interpreting the curator guide on when complexes can be used, I’ve followed this:

@jdmore

I think this can be true of complexes under the current guidance too, though you are right, it could be clarified. I read the sentence you quoted as covering three example “and/or” situations:

• Species sometimes intergrade
• there are places on the tree of life where adding hard range map boundaries is arbitrary
• identification to species level is often not possible

The other species group thread is also relevant, and I think there are a couple other threads about complexes on the forum.

Using the “and/or” phrasing of the above quote and the guideline of usefulness for identification, I’ve taken a pretty liberal approach to species complexes. Ideally they should be groups/complexes that are delineated in publications. However, iNat uses BugGuide as a source and even if it’s not recognized in literature and the taxonomy isn’t particularly ambiguous, BugGuide has Eupeodes americanus/pomus as a difficult to identify group/species pair and that’s sufficient for me to add it to iNat since a lot of observations can only go down to that level. Similarly, even if Greater/Lesser Scaup is only an informal tricky species pair, it’s well established and used on eBird etc. so I’d support having it as a complex so that potentially thousands of observations can be identified lower than genus Aythya.