Publishing your own 'field guide'

I’m not a back-country hiker. For most of plants we named, we could drive within 100 yards/meters of populations. A few (three?) we couldn’t, and I never saw them in the wild. (Fortunately, I work with tougher, more active colleagues.) The bigger problem is knowing where to look (based on herbarium specimens, discussion with other botanists, and carefully considering the geology of the area) and knowing what we’re looking at when we get there. And getting there at the best season for specimens.

I say we could drive to the sites and while that’s usually true (you can at least theoretically drive most places in the lower 48), sometimes the roads were poor and locked gates could be a problem. And don’t get me started with flat tire stories!

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Yeah that’s sort of my method as well. My problem is I like to do things very differently from other people because I always have a unique perspective and my own organizational schemes, which bureaucracies don’t favor. In book format that can be great, in papers not so much.

I perfectly understand the holotype concern, but sometimes the entire process can be difficult. I’ve had issues of this sort recently due to life circumstances outside of my control. The process is time-consuming and you need to be able to have the time, energy and stability to devote to it.

With a book, I can just pick up my manuscript where I left off and continue the process. My biggest concern is the actual publishing process, which is more an issue of physics and choice than anything. With a paper I have to juggle half a dozen tasks and half-complete them all before I can go back for another round and three-quarters complete them all, all while trying to work with multiple different agencies. And if you mess up a step, you can make a scientific name unusable. Forever.

Hahaha oh I’m definitely not a splitter. I like to keep perspective on the true number of actual species present. I’m not subject to a lot of the same social forces most scientists and researchers are under like publish or perish, which tends to encourage researchers to come up with as many new names (and new excuses for those new names) as possible to maximize the number of papers in their portfolio. I have very little patience for that sort of thing. There are actually a lot of tools that have become favored like “DNA barcoding” and “molecular clocks” which have very little actual science behind them. But they help researchers come up with “new species” which = new papers, so they’re used religiously. I have a pretty reliable rule: if two or more “cryptic species” are visually indistinguishable and syntopic (have the same geographical range and habitat), you’ve actually just got one species on your hand. This is a very heretical view in modern taxonomy, for the aforementioned reasons. If anything, my legacy will be as a scientific heretic working to rid the scientific endeavor of overused bad practices.

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I immediately thought the pattern of fractures might be diagonostic. Google: Le Fort Fracture
It seems that Monsieur le Fort had a penchant for picking up guillotined heads, running up to the top of a building, chucking them off, and looking for patterns.

One day the pendulum will swing back and you will be vindicated.

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It’s already beginning. A lot of people are getting tired of splitters pretty obviously over-dividing well-established species. The problem is that there is still an impetus to do it because you’re more rewarded for splitting than lumping or just leaving a species alone, and there’s basically no punishment for being wrong.

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And the iNaturalist spillover: splitters bumping observations of well-established species back to genus because “this is an undescribed species.”

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The other replies have raised lots of issues that might be roadblocks for publishing a field guide. I’d just like to make one suggestion that you might possibly follow, perhaps while you’re preparing to tackle those roadblocks.

In a sense, iNaturalist already has a field guide, in that every taxon page links to the Wikipedia page for that taxon. Many of these pages are just templates, waiting for someone to fill in the details. Other pages are more complete, but could still be improved, particularly with explanations about how to identify one taxon from another. You could begin working on those pages, right now, as practice for a “real” field guide that you might publish later.

One advantage of this approach is that you can work on any taxa that appeal to you, without having to worry about its “marketability” in a printed field guide.

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Oh yes! I’ve been creating wiki pages for- forever now! Especially taxons that don’t even have pages yet! It’s very fun in past time

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