it’s hard to imagine it being worse than it is now, so much so that it seems clear to me the current system has failed.
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I can imagine much worse. Dozens of parallel taxonomies with completely different names for the same organism. No junior synonyms, all names equal in the eyes of science. Yes, the current system has disagreements and problems but there are rules and standards that allow it to avoid complete chaos. Like most other human endeavors.
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Have you tried Seek? It functions very similarly to your description in the first paragraph.
I tested the CV on multiple dandelion observations recently and it recommended genus level for most of them (on a couple it got lost and didn’t know at all, but all its backup suggestions were Asteraceae). I assume it does the same on Seek. Even if people had observed a lot of different microspecies nearby, I assume it would still suggest genus because it’s the lowest common recognizable taxon of a bunch of confusing species.
i dunno, we already have multiple parallel taxonomies between different agencies, regions, publications, etc.I think people in taxonomic academia have no idea what it’s like in the management and applied ecology world. Taxonomists are happy to say ‘well it works for us, it must work for everyone’. Well, apply that to government bureaucracy and underfunded, donor-pleasing non profits, unethical consultants, small town conservation entities, etc. Out here it’s already your ‘worse case scenario’ just no one in taxonomy will listen. The system taxonomists created is not viable and it’s falling apart in the non-taxonomy real world.
the ‘rules and standards’ are meant to gatekeep not meant to create a taxonomy thats usable by everyone who needs it. You all are more concerned about who named the plant first than you are about names that are usable to other entities.
And yeah i hope i’m wrong. We are going to find out.
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Well, I use different taxonomies for the same organisms almost every day. E.g., species that are federally listed as Endangered under one name, but the most current taxonomy used by zoologists recognizes another name (or two). Agency bureaucracies don’t respond to change all that quickly but science can sometimes jump around a lot faster. One simply has to recognize that most things in life are not very neat and tidy. It can be a glorious mess but it doesn’t keep me awake at night.
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well i mean that’s the thing isn’t it. If something doesn’t bother person A, they won’t listen if person B sees a crisis coming. And, maybe person B is just full of it, but maybe person B has a point. I don’t find taxonomists willing to listen at all even when i lay out very imprtant concerns and evidence. So i guess i just maintain my own taxonomy, reject as many of the iNat changes as i can in my own observations, and hope for the best. I think it’s not going to be going very well for iNat or ecology as a whole over the next decade. But as i’ve said before, hopefully i’m wrong and all the ignoring of my and others’ concerns will end up not causing a crisis.
I’m sort of a taxonomist because I’m going to be describing a new species of plant. I’m listening and understanding your challenge because I experience the same challenges as you do. The problem is I haven’t seen any proposal that improves the situation. I only see the proposal to stop altering the taxonomy at some past (or present) point in time. Is that what the OP is asking about also? Whether we should use methodology devised after, say, 1970, to alter the taxonomy? That’s sort of akin to wanting medical practice to only use historical methodology (but not modern) to diagnose diseases because it will confuse doctors and patients (which it does).
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I’ve posted all kinds of ideas multiple times, people just don’t like them because it makes taxonomic splitting harder. It’s not helpful when taxonomists won’t themselves also change their choices. But i can’t speak for the OP.
I think genetics and other methods like that are valuable. my main issue is with the way species vs subspecies and other potential taxonomic levels are used. as well as with the rate of change which to me really does seem unreasonable. But others don’t feel that way.
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There is no “taxonomy czar” who can control the actions of taxonomists. No official agency with that authority. The code must be followed, but the code doesn’t create rules for what data to use to define species (or other taxa) and it doesn’t set a speed limit. I can’t imagine that the committee that creates/revises the code could even do so if it wanted to. People are too independent and we live in a fast-paced world. I’d like the rate of change of phone technology to slow down also!
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Every proposed name or revision of a name in taxonomy is a hypothesis about relationships. It might improve our understanding or it might not. I recall from sometime ago a proposal that new names or arrangements not be accepted right away, that they should be allowed to “sit” for maybe a year or more so that other researchers have time to evaluate them. Of course, nowadays, with internet technology new taxonomy gets around a lot faster and acceptance of it also seems to have speeded up. Maybe it’s because a lot more genomic evidence goes into systematics research and not all of us are adept at interpreting how good or bad that research is.
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One concern I have is that a lot of taxonomists/many botanists kind of don’t seem to understand hybridization. Like, I’ve seen a full book adjacent to the topic, written by a professional, that seemed to lack a foundational understanding of how hybrids work that would have been taught in the first week of a high school internship at a seed research company (i.e., horticulturalists have known this for a century or more).
The lack of consideration of hybrids is particularly consequential when doing taxonomic splitting, because past a certain point elevating splits to species level inevitably creates more and more ‘hybrids’. The fact that a lot of taxonomy on inat or elsewhere seems to either not handle hybrids or actively acts like individuals shouldn’t exist is a problem for studying them, a problem for IDing them on inat, leads to holes in ecological understanding, and can make conservation work harder (because there is always less interest in conserving individuals that have been labeled ‘hybrids’).
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well the code isn’t set in laws of physics, it’s a human construct and can and should be changed. I recognize that won’t happen, even if the cost of not doing so is catastrophic. For goodness sake we won’t even change human codes to stop climate change or ecosystem collapse and i concede the taxonomic revisionism and splitting epidemic is a much smaller issue than those. So we just try to make do with the very broken system we have. But it would be nice to no tbe berated for pointing out the system’s flaws. But that’s the fate of certain sorts of people and always has been. we don’t talk about Bruno.
There’s no authority to complain to–it’s thousands of individuals. To create a speed limit, you have to first establish the authority. Pointing out the flaws on an internet forum won’t result in creation of the authority required to set the speed limit at which new taxonomic changes are made. It just creates more opportunities for adversarial exchanges.
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Anybody who uses names for organisms needs some way to translate among the various names. Common names in different languages, scientific names from different times and different schools of thought. The common names are slithery in ways that are hard to predict – the same name applied to clearly different plants (see “Rose of Sharon,” a pink-flowered plant in the Mallow Family or a yellow-flowered species of St. John’s Wort; I get tripped up on 3 genera of “wintergreen;” in some areas, “Wild Carrot” used to be used as the name for Cicuta, Water Hemlock, a deadly poison). There can be dozens of different names in one language used for one species. And common names are used by everybody, so even if we want to standardize them, we can’t. We need some agreed-upon standard.
The best we have are scientific names and their associated classification. Is it a perfect system? Far from it. But it has evolved because people have tried to solve the same problems that beset common names and have done a fairly good job of it.
For one thing, as stated above, scientific names must be traced back to a type specimen, usually the physical plant or other organism, sometimes an illustration for some older species. That puts limits on the name. We may choose to apply the name broadly or in a very narrow sense, but whatever we do, that name has to include the type specimen.
We also have some requirements for publishing a name that will be considered valid by scientists. This is useful because it limits the possibilities. Can the system be gamed? Oh, yes. There’s a guy in the U.S. who looks for newly published subspecies names for plants and then publishes the variety equivalent, or if he finds a new variety name, he publishes the subspecies equivalent. There’s a snake guy who publishes every minor variant as a new species, even what must be one-gene polymorphisms. Worse yet, he knows enough about snakes that he does sometimes recognize new species. The poor snake taxonomists have to sift through his haystack of foolish names for the needles of useful ones. Groups that are both diverse and popular with gardeners (cactus, some orchids, and several others) end up with hundreds of validly published scientific names that we have to sort through for the useful ones. So yes, rampant oversplitting happens and we taxonomists hate it as much as anybody else.
What do we do with names from oversplit groups? We treat them as synonyms of other, earlier published names. Here’s a list of synonyms for Bluebunch Wheatgrass, a native grass of western North America: https://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:1159330-2#synonyms All those names (except the one you choose to use) are ones that POWO saves us from.
Where can you find synonymy for plants? IPNI is the most comprehensive. W3Tropicos is very good for many species. What these lack, though, is an indication of which of the synonyms is best, which name we should use. POWO does that. Basically, POWO wades through all the possibilities and finds which one follows all the rules and was first.
Problem: People can disagree about how to apply the names, or which name is most appropriate for the species. Are giraffes all one species or are they 3 or more? Should Tall Fescue (a big grass commonly planted for pasture) be included in the genus Festuca, Lolium, or Schedonorus? - valid arguments can be made for each of these. At least, using POWO, we know what its name is in each of those genera and we know that they’re all synonyms.
Note: We can’t get rid of the fact that taxonomists may disagree about how to apply names, any more than we can standardize all common names. We can, and do, limit the ways scientific names can change and create trails, breadcrumbs, that lead from one name to the next.
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Some things iNaturalist can do to minimize name changes while still using accepted scientific names.
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Create species (or subspecies) complexes, group of taxa that are each other’s closest relatives and can’t (easily) be told apart from the kinds of photos iNaturalist usually gets. iNaturalist already does this and can do more. You could volunteer to work on the ones that matter to you.
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Make synonyms available so that, for example, if you know Bluebunch Wheatgrass as Agropyron spicatum, you can type that in and get the observation labeled as Pseudoroegneria spicata, its currently accepted name. iNaturalist already does this and should add more synonyms as observers or identifiers bring up their preferred names. iNaturalist should not attempt to replace IPNI or POWO as a source for synonyms.
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Unfortunately, creating complexes of species that aren’t each other’s closest relatives, e.g. mimicry complexes, doesn’t fit the taxonomic framework iNaturalist uses. I don’t see a way around this at the current time except by the use of observation fields and/or projects.
Also note: Improving observers, e.g. trying to get them to take better photos, is desirable in theory but rarely effective in practice.
Also note: Complicating this already complex website with more pop-up windows or implying different things by applying different colors to species names is not, in my opinion a good idea.
I think iNaturalist does a pretty good job of dealing with taxonomy and its problems. Some groups, e.g. dandelions, are irredeemably messy, but that can be dealt with by identifying to genus or to section. And if people strongly prefer species ID’s, this is an occasion for education about the messiness of real life.
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Just talking abstractly about “lumping” and “splitting” and “people out there somewhere” seems unproductive to me. It’s the nuanced details of how you decide to define a species that results in all downstream inflation. If we have problems with species inflation in general then we need to figure out at the source what is causing the problems and address them there. Are people just basing new species on percent difference in genome? Tiny variations in phenotypes?
I’m most with the general species concept with birds where there are overarching taxonomic authorities that have a fairly consistent method. Just from following North American bird taxonomy (overseen by the American Ornithological Society) for a bit over a decade I’ve seen enough edge cases discussed to know where the line is and generally it makes sense to me. American/Northwestern Crows and Thayer’s/Iceland Gulls were lumped recently, Pacific-slope/Cordilleran Flycatcher and the redpolls may be lumped in the next couple years. Discussion of splitting various species (Eastern Meadowlark recently, maybe Willet, Yellow-rumped Warbler, White-breasted Nuthatch soon…) has been going on for years.
The most important factor seems to have been detailed analysis of hybridization; how large the overlap zone is, how successful hybrid offspring are, etc. But because birds use vision and sound to communicate with each other, their appearance and sound tends to be correlated with reproductive isolation as well so identifiability is also a factor. Birds are relatively “large” animals too so subtle differences are easy to see.
I have no idea how you are supposed to determine those things when you’re studying insects or plants because they don’t necessarily distinguish among themselves using the same features we use to distinguish them (which also makes studying hybridization difficult I assume). You also don’t have overarching authorities who can have a consistent species concept and make authoritative decisions about the state of the literature. Personally in learning plants, invertebrates, herps, etc. through iNaturalist the species have generally made sense to me as being consistent with the species concept I grasped from bird taxonomy, they’ve just often been more frustrating to identify because they’re smaller organisms or use more obscure features to separate.
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i absolutely think iNat would be big enough to be part of that speed limit, if we could agree to do it. Which we won’t. But we could.
I actually did this several years ago for Carex, along with some others. One person decided they liked a different way of arranging Carex, so completely wiped it out without talking to me or others who had done the work. Eventually after raising a huge fuss i got it reversed, but there was no way to reverse the names that got auto-changed and a bunch of my data and that of others got seriously degraded. The person didn’t even apologize and refused to fix it on their own after being called out by multiple people even a co author on the paper they based it on. So yeah, i won’t be doing any more volunteering like that until a better system is established.
this is helpful to an extent, but it would be better if it let me keep the synonymous name, i recognize that’s difficult but the way it works now all my observations get continually changed to differetn names making it impossible to cross reference with other less revisionist databases (which is nearly all of them, iNat is VERY revisionist).
we change the taxonomic framework. There isn’t any other option. It may bother people but… too bad? We certainly don’t all get what we want and the splitter contingent has gotten way more than their share of ‘wins’ out of this all.
What system do you think would be better? If what you said is accurate, the curator you mentioned was clearly acting against normal etiquette and guidelines already, which is why events like that don’t happen more often. No system is going to prevent people from being selfish and short-sighted.
I’ve been trying to get more infrageneric taxonomy added to a bunch of large genera, but it’s generally been a very slow process because I’ve been trying to get input from people who are more familiar with genera and they’re often busy, plus it’s sometimes pretty complicated to figure out the state of the literature…
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well, there was no consequence for that person, or for other curators doing things they shouldn’t, basically if it’s a split or a change it is embraced. If it’s a cry to slow down change it gets crushed. To say the least the curators and mods have a history of very selectively enforcing the rules in certain cases. In the least if you’re redoing a bunch of sections you should message the person doing it. They probably made a flag somewhere, kind of like posting a notice in Alpha Centauri that the earth is to be leveled for an intergalactic highway. There’s no way to be able to find them all. But i guess that’s kind of off topic and some forum mods will come lock the thread if i keep talking about it so yeah.
i don’t think a split should ever bump any observation up to genus or higher. if you’re splitting taxon A into taxa B and C, there needs to be an infrageneric bucket for exactly and only what was Taxon A. Regardless of whether it’s monophylletic, because the purpose is data integrity, not making a perfect taxonomy (and i dont think its possible to have purely monophyletic taxonomy in all cases anyway.
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