This misses a major issue - application of species concepts. Even if species are objectively real entities, there is both disagreement about the definition of a species and inconsistencies in the application of species concepts to lineages (both due to disagreements about definition and lack of evolutionary information).
It’s also a major oversimplification to say that species boundaries inherently have less ambiguity than subspecies boundaries. Maybe that would be the ideal case in an orderly world with perfect information, but that’s not the conditions taxonomists operate under.
Many taxa that are currently considered species now were classified as subspecies 5 or 10 years ago. That change wasn’t due to evolution, just changes in how humans interpret species concepts. Discarding any information about subspecies would toss out a lot of valuable information about those observations, and make assigning them to species after a taxonomic split much more time consuming.
on the contrary i think the subspecies concept is important beacuse like fogarty says, the less subspecies gets used the more people try to divide species into these tiny units. I think we should have MORE subspecies use, but also i don’t think people should identify them solely by location. And if people don’t want to do subspecies (i don’t unless i can see the relevant traits), they should be able to opt out
Definitely in agreement here - there are many poorly described subspecies (including those based mostly on range or average measurements) that should probably be avoided on iNat. But there are also tons of useful, readily identifiable forms that are currently classified as subspecies.
Individual users can absolutely decide whether they have the knowledge to use subspecies ranks on a case by case basis, but completely removing those taxa from iNaturalist would result in a tremendous loss of information (not that I think that change is a realistic possibility that the platform is considering).
I feel like this discussion has massively derailed. The question was answered and the validity of subspecies was not it. We should only ever ID anything if we can say that we are relatively certain of our ID. Subspecies, whether they exist or not, may not be defined by soemthing we can see in provided media for a given observation. Thanks again to those who helped me in a confused time. Please let this thread die with dignity :)