Moving common names from one species to another

[chrisangell]

@opihiman

As a result, all but one of the 500+ US records of this taxon were only identified to the species level, even though only one subspecies has ever been documented here by the people who check on such things. And now that iNaturalist has adapted to the science and boosted the subspecies to full species, all of those 500+ US records (minus one) are now identified as the wrong species.

I don’t know the specifics of this situation, but do you think this could be automatically corrected with an atlased taxon split? If a curator set up atlases so the one species is only known from South America and one from the Mexico and Texas (or whatever the correct known ranges are) you should be able to split Lasaia sula [sensu lato] into Lasaia sula [sensu stricto] and Lasaia peninsularis. If it’s set up correctly, L. sula ID’s will all change to L. peninsularis in areas where the atlas indicates L. sula sensu stricto doesn’t live. In places where they both live, they’ll be bumped up to genus, and in places where there’s only L. sula, nothing will happen.

This obviously doesn’t solve the problem of future ID’s and common names but I thought I would throw out my suggestion for this one part of the problem.