Question about criteria for mouse subspecies identification

It is an interesting question.

Personally, I don’t do this or think it’s a good use of time since it isn’t adding any new information to only ID based on location (the location is already in the observation data) and might lead to cases where a different subspecies is ignored/missed/misidentified. That is, IDing by location only is a sort of positive feedback loop that just reinforces/concretizes existing knowledge about ranges (and that data may not always be correct or those ranges may be changing/fluid…)

The issue has come up on several other forum posts that may help out:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/choosing-not-to-identify-subspecies/699
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/id-based-on-range-or-appearance/524
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/thoughts-on-subspecies/23081

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