well, that might be my gold standard, but i recognize it won’t happen. The thing is, with taxonomy, there aren’t objective ‘facts’ as to what is a species vs a subspecies, for instance. That’s why it’s so controversial. It’s not like discovering a new element which has a discrete number of protons, neutrons, and electrons. These are very complex systems with non-discrete breaking points and some people want to very rapidly change things based on new ideas, and others do not.
Well, one of the ways it might be easier is for inat to itself have characteristics within it for these new species people want to add, instead of hoping someone adds their paywall-hidden proposed dichotomous key to wikipedia or whatever. but inat has said they don’t want that. I guess the bottom line is, if you’re doing hundreds of vegetation plots with dozens of species each, you can’t check every single plant, in the field, every time - thousands of checks a year - to make sure the species hasn’t changed and if so how it’s changed, and whether diagnostic features are even available. Like if someone is doing a field survey visiting 100 plots each with 20 Pinus ponderosa sensu latu in them, would you literally suggest someone takes a branch from each of 2000 trees to make sure someone hasn’t declared them a new species this week? Plus tens of thousands of full literature checks for every other twig within the plot? Because i know you must realize that doesn’t work.
Ok, well i can agree with some of this, some taxonomic changes were helpful to the community, even if i don’t like them, and some were not. But right now there’s no real controls on the curators with the latter, which is the thing i’m posting about here. Obviously some changes are wanted by most people, and if it’s just me who doesn’t want it, obviously i am not some sort of inaturalist dictator and they will happen anyway. But many of these changes i do believe the majority of users who observe those taxa wouldn’t want. And you aren’t having that discussion within the current flag system. Even i who obviously has a lot of interest in taxonomic policy are caught unaware of these changes more often than not, let alone other users who don’t obsess over it the way i do
This is where it’s hard for me to retain the ‘good faith’ assumption, because i can’t understand why you and others push this exclusivist view. I do not think using paraphylletic groups should be mandatory, but literally no one is proposing that. If a species complex is created that you don’t like, just don’t identify your observations to that level, and do non-disareeing IDs to a higher level than it. It’s that easy. If you continue to oppose them,I’d like to hear why you not using them isn’t enough, and why you have to ruin them for others as well.
but can you please talk to some conservation ecologists that aren’t also taxonomists? No one wants to ignore genetic variation within a species, some people just don’t think it benefits conservation to try to push every genetic variant to the species level. Which is a whole other issue. I am not saying your Malacothamnus splits are bad, that genus is ridiculously complex as you know better than me, and isn’t observed all that often on here anyway. I’m not questioning your research on those. I’m talking about things like the ponderosa pine and yucca splits, and shoving the fern and spring ephemeral wildflower taxonomy of eastern north america in some rapid fire blender with no consideration given to the downsides of this approach at all.
well maybe we shouldn’t be spending so much time on that? That’s kind of my point.
Well that’s literally all i’m asking for. Also you like several others seem to be implying that anyone who doesn’t want to spend hours of precious field time each season re-learning the same taxa as new microspecies is lazy and concerned with ‘convenience’. I’d much rather have those extra days conducting field inventory amidst the bugs and thunderstorms and such, which seems a lot less ‘convenient’ than sitting in an office re-learning dozens of common taxa each year, keying out all your old specimens each year to make sure some theoretician hasn’t split it into 35 microspecies, or whatever else the far-splitter contingent would want here.