Yes, but this is a good example of the issue. The person who made the change wouldn’t revert it and the error persisted for months, causing major problems with the iNat sedge taxonomy. It shouldn’t have been made in the first place, and the consequences are just hand-waved away by curators who, for whatever reason, just really want the change.
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I think of peer review as a bare minimum. Some changes that are peer reviewed still don’t belong on iNat, but no changes that aren’t do belong here, if we are using a scientific framework for taxonomy. Of course the process was very different in Darwin’s time, but there was no internet and no iNaturalist, among many other things.
then please, please just leave it alone. Or creat a subspecies level rank. these things do not belong on a citizen scientist website meant to connect people with nature. nor do they belong in an ecologist’s notebook or a federal agency’s files. They belong in the realm of hypothetical taxonomy, and untill everyone is given a free trichorder, that is where they need to stay.
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I agree: if a taxonomic name change hasn’t undergone peer review it shouldn’t be adopted here, and passing peer review doesn’t immediately justify accepting a change.
Further to the discussion of different kinds of peer review, it’s important to understand what peer review actually evaluates. In general, peer review assess the scientific rigour of a paper. That might include the appropriateness of the analysis, the sufficiency of the data, and how the results are interpreted.
It doesn’t necessarily apply to the taxonomic conclusions. The science may be rock-solid, but it won’t necessarily follow that there is a single correct taxonomic outcome. Different scientists may take the same data and interpret it as supporting two species, two subspecies, two varieties, or two forms that don’t warrant formal names. The peer review process may filter out more extreme claims, but species vs subspecies sorts of things are unlikely to have a firm yes/no answer.
There’s no official rule or governing body to adjudicate such issues. If you check a few online references you’ll see that they don’t all agree in all cases, and none of them are actually ‘official’ (for plants at least, I think some of the animal groups may actually have official naming authorities?).
In practice, such disputes are resolved informally when the majority of scientists adopt one or the other of the competing options. That process used to take years, as the new results filtered slowly through journals into the hands of specialists, and eventually into field workers. Nowadays it appears to take days, given everything is available more or less instantly online.
All of which to say there’s a very strong case to be made that iNat ought to take a very conservative approach when changing taxonomy. In most cases waiting a year or more after a publication before adopting a change would be reasonable in my view.
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100% all right with option c) that means to ask main users before to valid a change proposal.
I think that POWO is regularly changing, then, iNat community should have got a few criticism before to follow any disruptive recent changes on POWO… Sometimes conservatism could have good benefits.
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if a taxonomic name change hasn’t undergone peer review it shouldn’t be adopted here
The species Erythranthe percaulis was published by the same author, in the same journal as the Euthamia changes (so presumably without peer review); it is a narrow endemic, in the CalFlora database, and we have 18 observations of it. By this rule, we would have to delete it and knock those observations back to genus, which doesn’t strike me as especially constructive.
In most cases waiting a year or more after a publication before adopting a change would be reasonable in my view.
I think the cases that would require such lengthy deliberation are, in fact, exceptional. Phytotaxa, say, is stuffed with descriptions of new species; while there are exceptions, based on my experience in ferns & lycophytes, most of these novelties continue to be recognized rather than reduced to synonyms.
I think a more reasonable criterion would be based on the number of observations changed by a taxon split/swap. It would make sense to have some minimum amount of time for deliberation before committing those (unless it’s a change on a fixed schedule, like the eBird/Clements swaps that just went through).
It would also be nice if drafting a taxon change fired notifications–right now they only appear once it’s actually been committed and it’s too late to discuss, as far as I can tell. It would also be nice to make flags more easily discoverable. I think some of the problems have arisen because a relatively small core of people is trying to resolve taxon flags; if we had more experts at, say, the family level weighing in on putative taxon changes, I think fewer disruptive changes would get committed.
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Certainly that is one effect that should be considered. The lack of peer review has also been mentioned. Another “red flag” is the lack of technical documentation for a general audience. If there is no wikipedia article for the taxon, or if there is an old article based on outdated assumptions, I can predict that observers and identifiers will have difficulty incorporating the taxon change into their mindset. Not everyone derives the same benefit from a peer-reviewed journal article.
A taxon split/swap confounds everything that has ever been written about the taxon. If you find yourself describing the change in terms of “sensu lato” and “sensu stricto”, it’s almost guaranteed that people will be confused.
Basically what I’m trying to say is: it’s important to evaluate each taxonomic change from the point of view of observers and identifiers since they’re the ones that eventually have to incorporate the change into the iNaturalist platform.
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yes. This is right. We all should have, as far as possible, a practical approach. As regards, I would add that, in some cases, if possible, even though the backbone may suggest the opposite, it could be preferable to keep taxa at the specific level due to the well-known issue with subspecific IDs not leading the OBS ID.
Peer-reviewing can provide a certain guarantee that what proposed by authors is reliable. But, let try not to consider what is peer-reviewed scientifically “bomb proof”. There are many researches published in authoritative peer-reviewed journals that end up being proven wrong in a short time.
What you write is certainly likely. I would just add that neither the existence of a relative page on wikipedia is a guarantee that the “general” users would be aware of that and could feel confortable with that taxon change. On the other hand, I think a taxon change adopted in iNat could encourage certain users to ask for an explanation and/or to get more insight into the taxonomy of a give taxon.
I think another criterion might be whether newly split taxa can be told apart on the typical iNat photographs. Since iNat is based on pictures rather than say microscopy or DNA sequences, it frustrates me when something that used to be easy to slot into a species assignment suddenly becomes unidentifiable past genus on iNat because there are now two or more cryptic species listed and nobody can tell them apart just based on pictures. I would suggest to at least then create a species complex in those cases.
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or subspecies or some other mapping unit.
It also breaks a bunch of databases and degrades the quality of legacy data, at least broadly across the field.
I agree. Again this is a place to connect people with nature and collect ecology data that can be observed by people in the field, not a place to differentiate microspecies based on genetic analysis. That can happen elsewhere.
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or subspecies or some other mapping unit.
What should the non-peer-reviewed Erythranthe percaulis be a subspecies of, instead of a species?
Again this is a place to connect people with nature and collect ecology data that can be observed by people in the field
Would it be unfair to say that your preferred species concept, at least for vascular plants, is “can be distinguished in the field in a few minutes with a hand lens, when in season?”
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Peer review does not impress me. Show me a peer reviewed paper on plants and I will point out all the errors. The mentioned Phytotaxa is one of the worst, just recently an erratum of some 200 corrections was published for one of the papers https://doi.org/10.11646/phytotaxa.597.3.5 clearly showing how floored the peer review process is. Moreover some of the fundamental sources of taxonomic data are books like revisions or Floras like the Weakley Flora SE.US. (much pushed by some here) and none of these are peer reviewed. (At least Darwin presented his findings to a group of his peers before publication so they could comment).
There are soooo many taxonomic programs out there (POWO, WFO, CoL, Eol, GBIF, TROPICOS, Calflora…) rather than creating another iNat one, we should be collaborating and working together to come to a widely accepted taxonomy that can be used by most. In many ways that is what WFO https://about.worldfloraonline.org/tens tries to achieve but having tried myself to bring together some of the loudest and most critical iNatters with the WFO TEN’s they quickly ran out of steam when they tried to make a real world comprehensive and widely acceptable taxonomy. It is maddening that a taxonomic backbone is what everyone wants but none of the existing programs can find any funding and the attention span of collaborators is very short.
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I’m not the one supposed to be figuring this stuff out, but i think those who did could. The issue isn’t the people studying the plants, it’s the framework being used.
In one sense, yes. but names also need to be stable enough to be usable. Even if a criterion can be determined in the field, if the taxonomy is completely shuffled every 5 years it’s still an issue.
The point isn’t that peer reviewed changes should always be accepted, it’s that non peer reviewed ones never should.
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I guess this is getting beyond the topic of this thread but I don’t think field identifiability is something iNat curators should be making taxonomy decisions based off of? iNat curators aren’t supposed to be creating their own (or iNat’s own) custom taxonomy, so we have to use whatever the current consensus is.
The advancement of DNA analysis has resulted in a lot of splitting and discovery of cryptic or near-cryptic species. Perhaps eventually (hopefully?) the pendulum will swing back towards prioritizing biological (reproductive isolation) or phenotypical species concepts more but that doesn’t seem to be where taxonomists are at now.
Agree with this for sure, and hopefully taxonomists will make species groups or more formal subgeneric taxonomy so that iNat curators don’t have to be making these groups up for ID practicalities.
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Some curators are taxonomists and I think it would be good to let them try to interact with the backbone in order to foster their point of view on a given taxon.
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I smiled a bit reading your comments about frustrations with POWO. I also find POWO’s choices frustrating, but for the taxa that I deal with that’s mostly because the POWO editor(s) seem too willing to prefer lumping into large genera on the basis of preliminary phylogenetic results. For example, POWO lumps the genera Polianthes, Prochnyanthes and Manfreda into the huge genus Agave citing one of POWO’s frustrating almost recursive references:
Govaerts, R.H.A. (2011). World checklist of selected plant families published update Facilitated by the Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
I believe that the actual transfer was likely made by Joachim Thiede in 2001 (in a book that I don’t have access to). And I accept that several genetic studies imply that Agave is paraphyletic if those three genera are excluded. But it really seems unclear to me that the phylogenetic analysis has been sufficient to settle this, as much of it was done 10–20 years ago based on a small number of sequences. There appears to be a fair chance that clades diverged in a slightly different order, and that might well favor a different generic arrangement. Given the preliminary evidence, I feel that POWO is hasty to accept lumping these genera into Agave.
In contrast, the newly described species that I come across are almost always in peer-reviewed journals (FWIW) and are clearly differentiated in morphology (not always in iNat photos, of course). The challenge is mostly to make sure that POWO picks up on these species, especially when they are published in non-English journals.
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When I look at POWO, they cite a 3 year old original study "(2020). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2020.536135. " by taxonomists from the areas where these plants grow; as opposed to Westerners wanting to impose their views on them…
You also need to read the about pages which clearly say “Newly published names are added from IPNI annually into the names backbone” https://powo.science.kew.org/about so how you can conclude
I have no idea as IPNI picks up all names over time.
this is not correct. I recently had to manually register several plant names with IPNI that were published more than ten years ago. They do miss names all the time (which is not a criticism, just an objective statement)
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They may miss new names all the time but by people like yourself adding them they get them all over time.
It does of course take time as the statistics show https://ipni.org/statistics . but that is not because of any language bias. Hopefully from 2025 there will be mandatory registration and then they will get 100% immediately.
It should also be noted that ecosystems also don’t run PCR to “tell species apart.” If morphological look-alikes are also ecological “look-alikes,” it is questionable whether the different genetic lineages are important enough to justify separating them. Any two disjunct populations will necessarily also be distinct lineages.
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I’m sorry, I was too hasty and overlooked the citation labeled “POWO follows these authorities in synonymising this name”. Previously I believe they only listed the 2011 citation labeled “This name was accepted following an alternative taxonomy by these authorities”, but obviously they have added a more recent citation. I’m not sure that Jiménez-Barron et al 2020 supports POWO’s choice for the generic limits of Agave though (see below).
as opposed to Westerners wanting to impose their views on them…
This comment, however, is very much an assumption on your part and becomes somewhat offensive insofar as you presume to characterize my motivations. I respect the botanists responsible for the Jiménez-Barron et al 2020 study cited by POWO, but I’ll note that iNat’s divergence from POWO taxonomy for these three genera was originally requested by other Mexican botanists of equal standing. Most publications by Mexican researchers studying these species over the past ten years have continued to use Polianthes, Prochnyanthes and Manfreda, rather than Agave, for these species. This isn’t some personal crusade by an arrogant Westerner.
I don’t have time right now for a close reading of Jiménez-Barron et al 2020 (though I’ve read it a couple times before), but my impression is that the authors are not really focused on determining the taxonomic limits of Agave and are careful to make clear when they’re using Agave s.s. and when they’re using Agave s.l (including Polianthes, Prochnyanthes and Manfreda). Their focus is more on the timeline and rate of divergence of the various clades and the morphological characters common to each. The paper doesn’t transfer species in or out of Agave.
In contrast, the papers that did make taxonomic transfers of all the Polianthes, Prochnyanthes and Manfreda species into Agave were (IIRC) written by Joachim Thiede, mostly in collaboration with POWO’s Rafael Govaërts, a German and a Belgian botanist. I imagine you would like me to view them as “Westerners wanting to impose their views on taxonomists from the areas where these plants grow”.
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