Hi folks,
Sorry for the delay on this. I’m aware that I’ve bottlenecked the bird taxonomic updates and I apologies for how that has slowed things down. But I’ve been struggling with the fact that for groups like birds with lots of observations and lots of associated content its just too difficult for curators to do all the steps needed under our current system to properly curate these taxa without introducing a lot of new issues.
Often times just doing one simple operation to the tree - like splitting a genus in two - actually requires many-many taxon changes and moves in order to tie up all the loose ends. Its just too hard to do all these steps manually and too prone to error.
Over the past month, I’ve spent a lot of time using the Clements 2019 update as a test case for trying to figure out a more efficient way for us to properly carry out tricky taxonomic updates like those involved here.
Where I’m at is that I’ve come up with a higher level structure for describing a taxonomic alteration which may involve many individual taxon changes etc. to carry out. I’ve come up with a new kind of figure for visualizing these changes, for example here’s a figure that tries to summarize the steps involved in splitting Alethe castanea off from Alethe diademata and the associated taxon changes (one split and 3 swaps)
And for each of these, I’ve created a group of all the taxon changes necessary to bring our taxonomy in line with Clements 2019. For eample, here’s the changes necessary for figure above:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes?change_group=Alethe+diademata+swing-split
I’ve tried to capture all of this in detail in this very long document I just posted:
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/how+taxon+changes+work
Buried in that doc are links to all 176 alterations like the one in the figure needed to bring our taxonomy in line with Clements 2019. Most are pretty simple things like elevating a subspecies to species status. But a few are super gnarly and involve many many taxon changes like this one involving Oenanthe and a few other genera. And I wanted to make sure the system could handle super complex changes like these:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes?change_group=Myrmecocichla+reshuffle
There are two next steps:
-
it would be nice to commit these changes to finally get iNat’s bird taxonomy in line with Clements 2019. All of changes should be ready to go (e.g. the split outputs have atlases and ranges in most cases). Please take a look though and raise any concerns you may have here before I commit them. Also, we’ve realized that committing taxon changes with many many observations - such as many of these have - is creating performance problems, so I’ll consult with the team but when everyone is ok with these we’ll probably have to find a time/way to commit them that doesn’t bog down the site. Once we’ve gotten the taxonomy up to date with Clements, I have another set of processes to update the IUCN conservations statuses and range maps which have also gotten quite out of date over the years.
-
Please let me know what you think about the structures these figures are trying to convey. My vision is that we build functionality where instead of manually creating a bunch of individual draft taxon swaps and individually committing them and moving a bunch of associated taxa manually, you have a little tool for drawing a figure like these by specifying the input and output taxa and wiring up all the swaps and splits. Doing so would create the whole structure automatically including all the new inactive taxa and all the taxon changes. Then when you want to commit the structure it would commit all relevant taxon changes and move all the relevant taxa automatically. Thats what I’ve done here to create these 176 figures / groups of taxon changes and what will happen when we’re ready to commit them through the back end. But we don’t yet have a front end tool for doing these.
The ultimate goal, as several of you have written here, is to get back to having more curators involved in doing this work, but we need to make it at least an order of magnitude simpler to make these changes and and order of magnitude less error prone in terms of handling identifications and other associated content like distribution data. I’m hoping this is a step towards that but curious what you all think