One of the problems with the complexes is genetic testing has found taxa to be very complex, with a lot of genetically distinct entities that aren’t distinguishable without testing. Taxonomy sets out to create groups of things that are more related to each other than they are to anything outside the group (those are the monophylletic groups I’m always talking about). But the problem is this doesn’t always correspond with any observable difference. For instance, two plants that look identical might be less related to each other than one plant that looks different. Under the rules of taxonomy, you can not create a group for the identical looking plants without including the one that looks different. This is something iNautralist curators and other taxonomists are holding to VERY strictly, such that they won’t even create an informal group that is not monophylletic. But unfortunately this means taxonomy no longer tracks with what is observable in the real world, through community science, field surveys without genetic sequencers, etc. Also genetics is not straightforward, some genes change faster than others, epigenetics can change them I think (not well understood), evolutionary convergence may revive old genetic combinations (also not well understood if that happens), and with extensive hybridization, small scale monophylletic groups may not even exist and instead you get these species swarms that are too variable within themselves to be usable either (this leads to excessive lumping instead of splitting, splitting is the trend in taxonomy now so it is rare, but if lumping were a trend that would be a problem too) So modern, genetics-informed taxonomy is an interesting way to build hypothetical, hopefully accurate family trees about how taxa are related, but the family trees don’t actually match what people see out in the world. (imperfect example: you look very similar to your cousin Bob, more so than you look like your brother Joe, because genetics are complicated and you got the same hair color and facial structure as Bob whereas Joe got two copies some recessive genes and looks different) Youa re more related to Joe, but outside observers notice you are Bob’s relative and can’t even tell you are related to Joe).
So it’s hard enough to figure out how to sort this stuff in taxonomy, but how do you sort it when you are doing field surveys of plants without genetic sequencers, or even more so… how do you sort it on a website oriented around people taking pictures (or recording sounds) of organisms and trying to identify and track them? My whole point with this whole thing is that iNat, and field ecology, can’t follow the genetic path forever without excluding most people, so we need to find some other path or middle ground. But for some reason people read the genetic taxonomy as ‘the only true science’ and the only valid way to observe life. And taken to its extreme, unless you’re a wealthy academic or corprate person or independently wealthy, you aren’t going to have a sequencer, so you can’t really identify anything beyond ‘pines’ or ‘grass’ or whatever. You could argue it won’t go that extreme, but i don’t think we really know.
I know iNat doesn’t really have the resources to create it’s own taxonomy how it’s set up now. We certainly could set up a parallel field-based classification system that is roughly genetic based but allso pragmatically based on things that can be observed in the field and correlate with environmental charactersitsics and stuff. People say iNat ‘doesn’t have time’ or ‘can’t do that’, but we are putting a huge amount of time into trying to make our observations match the genetic modern taxonomy. so it isn’t really true we can’t do it. But it is a huge task. I’d argue there’s literally nothing better situated than iNaturalist for creating such a thing. But… if the community doesn’t want to… that’s certainly a valid reason not to do it. If the people running iNat don’t want us to, they can tell us not to and ban us if we do it anyway. Then we’d have to create another site which probably wouldn’t work. So yeah. I am searching for answers to this problem but it makes me some sort of weird pariah and i’m not particularly tactful so that just makes it worse, so if it were to succeed it probably wouldn’t be me driving it, heh.