Maybe this has been going on for a while, and I just haven’t noticed it until now. But it seems that POWO is allowing unpublished (“ined.”) names to be part of their accepted taxonomy. Example here.
I’d also ask this question: Is it right to accept BugGuide’s undescribed species names? Obviously, they are legit species and will be described eventually, but they are still ‘work in progress’ and need assessment and evaluations before they should be put into the taxonomy.
Just curious the example you linked to they are all subspecies and list 4 different authors ? How likely is it 4 different people are doing unpublished subspecies for 1 plant. Where are they getting the names from?
The authors you are seeing are for the basionyms of the unpublished subspecies combinations. Presumably a single author is planning to validate the combinations, but until they do, “ined.” goes where the combining author would be named. (I guess this is different from the ICZN, where new combinations can be made without authorship?)
Looks like they’re saying they disagree these taxa should be split into different species (e.g. Apocynum scabrum vs. A. venosum subsp. scabrum: http://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/77150624-1). So it’s a bit different case than accepting a wholly new or split undescribed species. Did you check with Rafaël? There’s not a trivial number of these (but a tiny drop in the grand scheme of POWO).
I haven’t yet opened a channel with him, figuring enough other folks were already bending his ear and not wanting to pile on or repeat something he had already addressed. But could be convinced on this one…
In one sense, yes. But in terms of mapping iNat taxonomy to POWO through Taxonomic Framework Relationships, we would still be deciding whether to “match” with an unpublished name, versus “deviating” with a published name. With undescribed species, it’s just the converse - deviating for an unpublished name.
Also, not every curator may know what “ined.” means, and just assume that if it appears in POWO as an accepted name, then it is fair game to curate toward in iNaturalist.
That’s a bit surprising–I hadn’t realized they were doing that. It looks as though these are being drawn out of WCSP? (They have a link to IPNI which is, of course, dead as it isn’t in IPNI.)
I agree that we should maintain our long-standing policy of not accepting unpublished taxon names, even if they appear in external databases. In this particular case, I think I’d deal with it by creating a deviation linking the valid name (if any) we use here to the taxon used in POWO.
I guess the question I would ask is what is the alternative ? I don’t think there is another global resource that matches POWO.
If the choices are having the monitor to check these don’t slip through or going back to having no reference for plants, I’d choose the first.
While there are some families with well maintained global references, having no reference at all for large segments of plants strikes me as a way to grind managing plant taxonomy to a halt, and way more conflicts as people point to every regional or whatever source.
Curious if anyone has reached out to POWO to ask about these?
Is it possible these are names which are published as full species but POWO is not accepting that treatment and resetting them as subspecies? And then saying the ssp is an unpublished name?
I did a Google scholar search on one of them as an example and it is clearly published both in Russian language articles and a 2020 monograph, but published as a species, not a subspecies.
Unpublished names should NEVER be used. An observation field “Description pending” or similar should be used, considering that it may remain pending for decades, and maybe never appear, or get another name …
This is something that drives me nuts as a professional taxonomist. Someone published a short paper with new combinations in a local plant group that I’m almost certain are wrong based on priority, but POWO accepts them unquestioningly and I can’t access the paper because it’s in a horticulture-oriented “journal”, not available online.
In one case a newer synonym was used in the new combination (possibly because they thought the older one was referring to a different species), and in another a correction to the species name was ignored.
The botanical system is much more complicated than the zoological. New combinations for animals never show anything other than the original author of the specific (or subspecific) epithet, no matter what genus or species/subspecies rank the name ends up in following a revision. The only change might be addition or deletion of parentheses around the author/year.
The second case doesn’t sound too bad. If it’s just an orthographic correction under the Code, you should be able to write to IPNI and point out that the spelling of the epithet should follow the (correct) spelling of the basionym, and they’ll correct it; that should bubble up into POWO.
The first case is a bit more difficult, and it does sound like you would need to get a copy to figure out what they’re doing. Sometimes direct solicitation of the corresponding author works.
swaps are still naively being made based on unpublished “accepted” names in POWO. is there actual language in the Curator Guide or any of the help pages that specifically details the fact that these cases should not be followed? I haven’t been able to find any, but surely no one should be encouraged to ever follow entirely unpublished nomenclature down a provisional taxonomy rabbithole.
a relative small amount it may be, but when I last checked, there were around 250 such “bad names”, so it will keep happening anytime anyone stumbles across those quarter-thousand. the exact number(s) may have changed somewhat since, but not that much.