Scientific_name corrupted for unusual taxons when exporting

Bug Reports
1

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website
Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Chrome
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/export

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):

Go to https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/export

Fill in these fields to search for:
Taxon: Horsetails (Genus Equisetum)
User: chris_nelson

The Preview section shows a couple matches for this taxon:
Giant Horsetail - Equisetum telmateia ssp. braunii

In the “Choose columns” section, click “None” for “Basic” and “Geo”. That leaves checkmarks only next to the various “Taxon” options.

At the bottom, click “Create export”.

Download and view the resulting CSV.

The scientific_name column shows “Equisetum telmateia subs” instead of the value I used to get: “Equisetum telmateia braunii”.

If I change the search taxon to “California Hazelnut”, the scientific name exports as “Corylus cornuta va” instead of “Corylus cornuta californica” (which is a subspecies, not a variant).

If I change the search taxon to “Clovers” and restrict the search to “Exact Rank: Genus”, the scientific name exports as “Trifolium sec” instead of just “Trifolium”.

There may be other similar errors. I haven’t gone through a full export in detail.

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Thank you for posting this @Chris_Nelson. Just a housekeeping note – your post accidentally got caught up in the forum’s spam filter, and I only just now found and released it. That’s why it didn’t show up right away. Apologies - this happens from time to time.

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That’s due to an issue with whatever module imports from external databases–right now, both “Equisetum telmateia braunii” and “Equisetum telmateia subs” are recognized as active scientific names for that subspecies. It’s very frequent to see “var” and “subs” imported as if they were epithets. They can be individually deactivated and deleted when encountered, but it would be nice to see a more systematic approach to the problem.

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Ah, I see what you mean that they are listed as additional scientific names. Presumably iNaturalist has a way to recognize the “preferred” scientific name, since that is the one that is generally presented. That should also be the one that is exported (given that only one name is exported). But maybe that’s the “systematic approach” you’re referring to.

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