Without getting into the details here, all of the observations of Andropogon glomeratus in Texas (among some other areas) should be swapped into Andropogon tenuispatheus. There are over 3,700 observations in Texas, so manually changing all of the observations and hoping to get enough identifiers to agree seems overly cumbersome and impractical. We can’t just swap all of A. glomeratus into A. tenuispatheus, because A. glomeratus is still a valid taxon in other areas. Is there a way to swap only the A. glomeratus observations in Texas to A. tenuispatheus?
Thanks for posting this, Josh. I’ve been manually going through several, but it would be magnificent if there’s more of an automated way to approach this.
It’s been mentioned about atlases, but I’m not savvy enough to know how these would change the taxon entries.
Yes, you need to have all the places with true glomeratus atlased for glomeratus, and then make sure Texas is in the atlas for tenuispatheus. The draft taxon change will let you run an assessment on the atlases so you can check your work before committing. A. glomeratus should be the input taxon and A. glomeratus and A. tenuispatheus should both be outputs.
You should also be sure that the observations should all go to tenuispatheus, and not e.g. to cretaceus or some other species in the complex.
Yes, you need to have all the places with true glomeratus atlased for glomeratus, and then make sure Texas is in the atlas for tenuispatheus. The draft taxon change will let you run an assessment on the atlases so you can check your work before committing. A. glomeratus should be the input taxon and A. glomeratus and A. tenuispatheus should both be outputs.
I and many of our local curators don’t know how to properly use the atlas and the steps involved in running an assessment. I think we need some additional details or list out the steps involved. Could you or someone else provide more detailed steps?
Go to https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes/new
Choose Split
Add the cited paper as a source
In the Input section, put A. glomeratus – make sure it’s 75432, not the complex
In the Output section, put A. glomeratus and A. tenuispatheus
You can save here and then Analyze IDs on the next page, or you can click Analyze IDs now, which would show you this:
You should click on “Atlased” next to A. glomeratus to open its atlas, and then clean it up, i.e. remove Texas, and then add or subtract other places as necessary. So if it really occurs in Brazil, add Brazil, or if it really doesn’t occur in Puerto Rico, remove Puerto Rico. You can “explode” places to get finer levels.
Then click “Not Atlased” next to A. tenuispatheus to create an atlas for it. Like for glomeratus, you should turn on the places where it really exists and turn off places where it really doesn’t. Make sure to set the atlas to active.
Once both atlases look clean, you can reset the analysis and run it again. It should tell you where the IDs will go and link to the observations that are affected. You can refine the atlases again if needed.
Agreed! Thanks for the detailed instructions. I’ve not tinkered around with atlases, so I think I updated both of these correctly. I committed the split, so hopefully all of the observations from TX (and west) will be swapped.
Many thanks Jane @jwidness!
