Let’s say you have 2 populations of beetles. One prefers upland forest and ranges further north, and one prefers riparian areas and ranges further south, because they prefer to feed on different plant species within the same genus of plants. However they can be found together at the same location. When mating, they distinguish each other by pheromones, and their genitalia have small but distinct differences. One tends to have shorter hairs than the other, but otherwise they’re visually identical from the outside. Should we call them the same species?
I think this gets at the conflicting priorities of taxonomists and field ecologists; for an academic entomologist they’re probably separate species, but for a field ecologist working at a macro level making a distinction between them is useless and you’d have to stay at genus or complex level.
Bugs and animals generally are for sure different from plants and elsewehere.
Terrestrial vertebrate taxonomy (particularly birds) has the advantage that it is effectively done, at least as compared to any other branch of the tree of life, so it is viable to have the approach where there is a genuine authority like Clements that updates only once every year or so, which is basically charlie’s preferred idea (the updates are a little more frequent as he suggests but there also aren’t nearly as many changes per year).
Bug taxonomy is definitely not even close to done and has more of these visually indistinct but reasonably objective/reproducible distinctions like you are talking about, but because of that species-level ID is not expected as the standard.
Plant taxonomy is also not done, and part of the issue is that there are both 1.) areas (both in the tree of life and geographically) where changes are needed fast because of fairly immature taxonomy and genuine discoveries 2.) areas where taxonomy is mature enough for the purposes of working ecologists/inat but where some tweaks are probably needed eventually. So a hard-fast ‘no changes for x period of time’ can’t actually work globally because of the areas that are case 1. However there is no reliable objective way for us to tell if a change is case 1 or case 2, and different scientists working on it may have different opinions.
subspecies. otherwise you’ll get no good info on that genus at all any more as the genus is swamped with a bunch of genus level observations. or worse the ecologists literally just stop collecting them. I see that happening with various taxa like Rubus and it’s a real shame. It’s possible a subgeneric entity could work here too.
What if you could confirm somehow that they never interbreed and haven’t for 200,000 years? (not sure what a reasonable number here is)
I’m thinking something analogous to Marsh/Willow Tits or Alder/Willow Flycatchers but the beetles use pheromones instead of songs.
Also what is the practical difference between “lots of species observations and a handful of hardcore observers going to subspecies” and “lots of genus observations and handful of hardcore observers going to species”?
Does Flora of North America update regularly? For example will they update their Taraxacum taxonomy to account for the new sections documented in the BC paper any time in the near future?
This gets at the species problem debate–which has no solution because evolution presents us with a continuum of divergence. After 200 years of debate, it’s not really worth debating any further. People will have to agree to disagree and have a beer.
It is confusing when we see statements like this, and at the same time, other statements saying that an organism can only be identified by sequencing. These seem to be two competing paradigms on iNaturalist: those who identify based on the kinds of traits that would be in the published description vs. those who refuse to identify without a sequence. And the latter seem to be driving the taxonomic framework.
The sides of this topic keep getting framed as taxonomists vs. field ecologists, but I’m not convinced that they really are. I am not a taxonomist, and I’m barely an academic. I am an ecologist and a land manager, and while I do think there are some valid concerns about too many splits, I would hardly throw around the word “catastrophic” or say that it’s impossible for me to do my job (despite having had species that I work with split during my career).
While I understand that extreme “splitters” likely exist (such as the ones @sedgequeenmentioned), I have yet to meet anyone that has demanded every species with modest population differences be split. And yet, there are people on this thread proposing that no species be split. To my eyes, it appears like you are fighting a largely-imagined extreme with the opposite extreme.
Fungi taxonomy is basically a bunch of underfunded people with an insane mushroom obsession trying to decipher and fix species that were improperly applied by scientists a hundred and fifty years ago thanks to having to figure out micrometer spore sizes with an old-school graticule and hand-drawn microscopic feature notes.
When they’re not doing that, they’re arguing about how to properly split up clitocybaceae (and making memes about it because I think everyone recognizes the situation is hilarious)
This hits the nail on the head for me, even down to listing profession (although I prefer to use the term land steward for my own job). For Northeastern North American botany I have found recent splits far more useful than detrimental.
I remember being aghast when someone pointed to a tiny hairy violet in deep shade in some of the highest quality woodland around and declared it as Viola sororia. I knew Viola sororia, keyed it out a dozen times. It’s a huge violet, grows in the lawn with rhizomes bigger than this plant I was looking at, but sure enough using that key it came out as sororia too. It was only recently that I saw some different names used for the violet in lawns (V communis) and was so relieved that an ecology that I have noticed and has hugely bothered me had a name to describe it. I feel the same way when I see a swamp aster growing with long rhizomes in the uplands. Ya it’s another split in my mental key to remember but Symphyotrichum firmum behaves and looks different to S punicium. I like to be able to name these ecologically distinct taxa, even if I have to reinterpret what a name means. It is useful to me understanding the ecology of the system, and I could care less about the papers that made them. I find in my work, botanical consulting and land stewardship in New York, recent splits to be generally useful to understanding underlying processes. In a few years I’ve had to learn a bunch of new names. When I reference historic lists I have to look up some names.
I do have an objection to obscure senior synonyms being resurrected despite having no real usage but that is straying away from the topic at hand.
It’s not data entry that concerns me it’s my brain space
I could imagine supporting a model that allowed usage to decide seniority (similar to what was done with Acacia) but it’s such a can of worms that I think the remembering a new name when someone resurrects an older name is preferable.
If somebody proposes using an “obscure senior synonym” for something that has a well-used scientific name, you can propose to conserve the name you’ve been using against that senior synonym. You have to provide evidence that the newer name is in use and the old one isn’t. This is a petition to the international committee on botanical nomenclature. There’s a format your petition has to comply with. It’s not all that hard, though. I’ve done it.
“casually engaged” wasn’t a poke at you, although I see why it could be read that way. I was thinking about how people who aren’t conservation professionals get engaged with nature as a hobby. I feel like the barrier to entry is lower when you can (mostly) ID things in the field on site–something about the immediacy of feedback. I’m uncomfortable about using “can you ID it on sight” as a hard criterion for species delimitation, because I think it can miss things that are important…but I know it would suck the joy out of vascular plant botany for me if I had to take most things back to the lab to ID. (I have a bunch of little paper bags of Sphagnum and Cladonia from last summer, still waiting for ID, to testify to this.)
On the other hand, I am not sure how relevant that is to most vascular plant splitting. Your flowering plant examples (Caulophyllum, Arisaema) hit 2 of my 3 most irritating recent splits (Asarum would be the third), but I don’t need microscopy or some other special technology; I just need to be there when they’re blooming. This is irritating and I’m open to the idea that we should try not to multiply these entities unnecessarily, but it’s still well within the remit of normal field botany.
By the way, how do you deal with Impatiens? I can’t distinguish the two native species from foliage, and am a little suspicious of people who claim they can, and I’m not usually in New England when the Himalayan balsam is coming up. “I have to be there when they flower and it makes my schedule harder, please don’t do that to other things” is a reasonable answer, and I’m curious.
Yeah, my experiences very much coincide with you and swampster. While I am a very part-time fern taxonomist and internet microcelebrity (thanks to iNat) most of my “naturalist time” goes to other roles: volunteer land management tasks, in conjunction with the PA Bureau of Forestry, county park system, Nature Conservancy, etc., trip leader for the Philadelphia Botanical Club, lots of contact with PA Natural Heritage Botanists and ecologists, and I frequently attend NENHC, a conference of New York and New England field people. And…absolutely no one I have met in those contexts has expressed any sense that splitting is leading to the system “falling apart”.
In my experience, splitting usually originates with the field people, when they notice that some population that’s supposed to be species “A” doesn’t look quite right, and doesn’t seem to have quite the same habitat as typical “A”, and so forth. That eventually provokes someone into doing genetic work on the Weird Population, and if it’s really different, it enters the literature as a split. And quite often the name for it is an old one, because someone recognized the distinction before only to have it lumped. This post by Justin Thomas on a distinction that’s clear in the field but lost in the herbarium is an interesting one.
Your example of Viola I think makes it clear why many people are comfortable accepting splits even when they can make field work more difficult. I have definitely not mastered Ballard’s new splits in that genus, which is frustrating…but examples like yours suggest that lumping is hiding taxa with high coefficients of conservatism. It’s not always practical to ID every Viola or Carex in a survey area (I’m an educator, so I understand doing the best you can under resource constraints), but I don’t see how it helps us to pretend they’re doing the same thing ecologically because they look more or less alike.
