I can see this has been discussed before, e.g. a thread that closed in 2020. However, it’s 2024 and there are still species that have one subspecies/variety and not the nominate one. Most recent example I find: iNaturalist lists Lolium temulentum ssp. remotum but not Lolium temulentum ssp. temulentum.
This should be almost mindless: If you recognize a subspecies or variety you by implication recognize the nominate one. Always. In every taxon. So either don’t include any subtaxa or include at least 2, the nominate one and the one that’s different.
I can see that if you find the nominate subtaxon and no other, you’ll have to search and see when it’s solitary (other subtaxa now recognized as species, maybe) but if the one you have isn’t the nominate one, you must recognize the nominate one.
Well, in this case, POWO recognizes L. t. ssp. remotum as L. remotum and iNaturalist follows POWO. So what’s needed according to this is to shift L. t. ssp. remotum to L. remotum.
Flora of North America recognizes L. t. ssp. remotum and therefore also L. t. ssp. temulentum. I personally don’t care. There are about 8 “species” of Lolium and each of them kind of fuzzes into at least one other one. Not satisfying.
A large majority of the single infraspecifics on iNat are orphaned by automatic inactivation of taxa that are without IDs/observations and are not accepted by POWO, and are therefore not the result of any human action. This happens when a species has 2+ infraspecifics that do not match the framework, but only one has associated IDs/observations, so when checked against POWO for automatic inactivation only the one without associated content is targeted for automated inactivation.
Therefore, this seems more along the lines of a feature request to not allow automatic inactivation of only one infraspecific.
As for your example, I’m not seeing an active taxon for Lolium temulentum ssp. remotum. Taxon 236784 is Lolium temulentum ssp. remotum, but was inactivated in 2017.
The same problem persists with subspecies in zoology (e.g. in insects which I go in for). I doubt that there exists some database for insects, like POWO for plants, with which the community names would be synchronised, but this does no matter. Anyway, so many species have some subspecies recognised as iNaturalist community names but not the nominotypical one! This makes no sense, since recognition of subspecies with the name other than specific automatically generates the nominotypical taxon with the same name as specific. Each time I am going to submit an observation of a nominotypical subspeices, I have to personally ask some curator to add it manually. But this would be so easy to generate the nominotypical subspecies immediately after another subspecies is added automatically by computer means, and this would correspond the essense of taxonomy and the subspecies concept.
I apologize. The Lolium issue had already been taken care of long ago, and I didn’t recognize that. (L. t. remotum came up as a possibility, but clearly synonymized with L. remotum.) I’ve run into this problem occasionally and then when I saw this one, I jumped the gun, complaining when there was no problem.
Please do be sure to include nominate subtaxon whenever you create a new subtaxon. But it’s less of a problem than I realized.
I’m not familiar with insect curation here on iNat, but if you would like to create a curation flag with some example taxa, I (or other curators) can take a look.
I don’t have a feel for how widespread the “missing nominate subtaxon” problem is. But for what it’s worth, it doesn’t seem incredibly rare to me, either - in just the last couple of months, I flagged the following as missing the nominate:
Gray Hairstreak (57k US observations, 12th most common butterfly/moth observation in the USA),
White-lined Sphinx (51k, 15th),
Polyphemus Moth (43k, 20th), and
Rosy Maple Moth (17k, 62nd).
So regardless of the status of the taxon you encountered, it sure felt like a timely reminder to me!
(Three of my flags have now been resolved/fixed, and the other is a bit more complicated).
This makes sense to me in theory, and it would be nice to have a tool to surface these issues automatically. I think there are also cases where it is unclear what the nominate means: for example, we have some cases where species x subsp y and species x subsp z are recognized within the range covered by a regional flora, but that flora does not address species x subsp x, which would not occur in the range covered by the flora, nor do flora for other regions mention any species x subsp x. Of course, perhaps in such cases we could just create it anyway, assumed to mean anything that isn’t y or z, even though arguably it is unlikely to be a useful taxon for anyone.
Yes. At any one place, the nominate subspecies may not occur. For example, in Oregon we have the grass Aristida purpurea var. longiseta but not the nominate variety, which grows only to our south. This is normal. It’s also not relevant to iNaturalist, which covers the whole world and therefore must include the nominate variety/subspecies of every species for which it recognizes any non-nominate variety or subspecies.
Nobody has to “create” the nominate subspecies or variety. It is created by implication each time any other subspecies or variety is published.
Well, that’s up to iNat staff. I think it’s better to establish the nominate as well as the other subspecies rather than have to come back later to do it. (Not to mention annoying the person trying to use the nominate subspecies.)
In that sense, yes, they are created. But if you’re saying that A. x subsp. y exists, you are saying that A. x. subsp. x exists (even if you don’t put it in words right now). Better to grasp that reality at the time than leave it for others to deal with later. If you really don’t think the nominate subspecies should be recognized, then you technically you must not (to confirm with the Code) recognize the other subspecies. And in fact, if you don’t consider the nominate subspecies worth recognizing on iNaturalist, why are you bothering with the other one anyway? Just using the species name would be good enough, in that case.
I’m not disagreeing with you on adding/maintaining infraspecifics, just pointing out that on iNat each taxon must be manually created but can be automatically inactivated, which is why this issue is so widespread (at least with plants). I could spend my day adding/reactivating 200 taxa that should exist, and the next day POWO could put through an update lumping them all and every single one without observations would be gradually inactivated without giving me any notification.
I believe this is part of the reason staff caution curators to avoid adding unobserved taxa. At this point I just think of it as part of the process for being the first to add an observation of a taxon.
…though I would be more specific and say that the nominotypical (we call it the autonym in botany…) should not be inactivated when additional infraspecifics exist in the species.
That said, it seems like the case I encounter more frequently are “orphaned” autonyms, where the other infraspecifics were lumped or moved, but the curator forgot to deal with the autonym.
This scenario isn’t covered by the Curator Guide, but I’ll propose that we should always add the nominate subtaxon (also called an autonym in botany) if our taxon authority recognizes another subtaxon that already exists in iNat, even when there are no current (or putative) observations of the nominate subtaxon. Leaving out the nominate subtaxon causes far more harm and confusion than could be justified by the supposed saving in curator time or indexing CPU resources.
26.3. The first instance of valid publication of a name of an infraspecific taxon under a legitimate species name automatically establishes the corresponding autonym
Of course, the rules of taxonomy do nothing to create taxa in iNat (or to prevent them from being automatically purged).
Remember that the noninate subspecies is the default: it means any example of the species that does not meet the definition of one of the other described subspecies. If there are any observations of the species, that are not the “other” subspecies, then the nominate subspecies has been observed. The only way your scenario could happen is if every observation of that species was of the “other” subspecies.
I mean, not always; there are cases where the nominate variety happens to be very niche, and another variety is far more widespread. There are cases where we have/had one variety+the nominate, and another variety that we haven’t created on inat is more common in inat observations than either. I think this can occasionally lead to incorrect IDs to the nominate, where people assume it must be the nominate by process of having excluded the one other variety we do have, without considering varieties we don’t have.
