Conclusion of the AI summary
Ultimately, the conversation highlights the need for more transparency, discussion, and flexibility in iNaturalist’s taxonomic change process to ensure that the platform remains accessible and useful for a broad audience.
but there isn’t some objective truth as to what is or isn’t species
The general assumption of natural sciences is that there is an objective truth (i.e., a reality that exists independent from the observer’s perception). If this was not the case there would be no science. It would just be my opinion vs. your opinion. There is still a lot to be learned about species concepts but the truth is out there (somewhere). What the truth is, is neither decided autocratically nor democratically.
We are a community, and we aren’t beholden to one branch of academia.
That is true but we are held to one taxonomic framework on this website. Whether we love it or hate it, iNaturalist can only have one classification as a taxonomic backbone. That will always leave someone disenchanted. I do believe that those who have the most extensive knowledge about their field should be the ones who decide on the classification (those are not necessarily people in academia - my own discipline entomology is a fine example where many excellent taxonomists are not employed in their field). Let’s put it that way: when I am on an airplane I don’t want passengers to decide how the airplane is steered. I prefer the pilot and copilot to make these decisions. Otherwise, I will look for other modes of transportation.
Yes, true. But i also don’t want the pilot to unilaterally choose where the plane goes. If i’m on a plane from Chicago to New York, if the pilot decides to go to Atlanta instead just because they like it better, we have a problem. This is a good analogy because it shows where the revisionists seem to get it wrong - forgetting that the vast majority of people using the names aren’t taxonomists. If pilots make it a habit to fly to the wrong city, even if they are safe pilots, no one is gonna use that airline any more. I’m not proposing literally every user just makes random taxa they like. I’m proposing the ‘pilots’ listen a little bit more to people in the plane who aren’t also pilots. If they want to go to Atlanta instead, try asking some of the passengers. They might say ‘yes’ for a variety of reasons, but if some of them say ‘no’, they deserve to be heard too, not forced to a city that they never intended to go to.
Two things coming to mind:
How does GBIF’s backbone work? Could something like that be implemented into iNaturalist?
I’d love to know how GBIF’s backbone works, but unfortunately I don’t think it would be suitable for iNaturalist. Whenever I peruse GBIF it seems like a bit of mess — duplicate species with slightly different spellings, outdated names, etc.
GBIF treats synonyms (almost) in the same way as valid current names, it is a bit puzzling. But at least they expose frankly the authorship, or else what a nightmare that would be… 
The way I see it Inaturalist is more focused on the user and less on the academic data side or they would allow more museum collections and the like. The average user I Id an observation for does not know or care about the latest in genomic taxonomy, they just want to know what it is and either check it off a list or lean more about it on their own. It’s weird to me that INat would try to keep up with taxonomic changes, some that are only split by genetics. This is primarily a photo data set and the taxonomy on site should reflect the limits of photography not the cutting edge of new taxon.
Yes, this degrades the “pure science” value of the observations but anyone using INat data for research should be aware of and able to compensate for the bias a photographic taxon system would have. Having the taxonomy suit Inat and not researchers also preserve volunteer resources as we have to go over observations multiple times and explain to the original poster why we changed their observation. That is even assuming that I as an Ider know why it was changed in the first place. This is a big issue in fungal ids and for insects who often cannot be ided to species without dissection.
I would like Inat to lead its own course rather than get stymied keeping up with fluid taxonomy. Species complexes solve some of these problems but really at the end of the day the research grade should be pegged to whatever the lowest taxon is that a photo or sound can capture.
I think the challenge here is that there is no existing taxonomy that is designed this way. We cannot simply switch to a taxonomy that works better for us–we would have to create it.
It is a lot of work to maintain the system as it is, but it would be an order of magnitude more work to create a new system. Maybe that ought to be done, I don’t know, but that’s a policy decision that would need to be made at a higher level than these forums.
well, it’s more work for some and less work for others. It depends on who the primary constituent is. is it taxonomists, site users, or someone else?
Yes, this is exactly my point. I edited it out of my original post because I was afraid the details got rather tedious. 
The current system is somewhat more work for everyone using the site, but it’s very easy in the short term to keep doing what we are already doing.
Creating a new taxonomy that is designed to be easier for the average user would make things easier for the average user. In the long term, I think it would require about as much specialist work to maintain. (You would still need about as many people qualified to follow all the taxonomy updates and decide which ones to incorporate). But in the short term, it would require a lot more specialized work. The barrier to switch to a newly-created taxonomy would therefore be quite high.
So yes, it works out to a lot of work for a small number of people vs. a little work for a lot of people, and on paper this looks like a fair choice, but in practice, the resources have to be available to do that short-term work. This is well beyond the scope of these forums.
I guess? i feel like easiest would be to stop changing taxa at all unless it’s true new species (not a split). But obviously many people vehemently disagree with that, thus me proposing various compromises that some of the taxonomists also reject.
But yes it’s true that species groupings based on what can be identified on iNat photos would be a lot of work, and only work for some taxa. I think it would work well for vascular plants in many/most areas, for instance, but for isopods or something? who knows, perhaps not. But i’m the wrong one to ask.
My 0.02 (haven’t read the entirety of the thread so I apologize if I’m reiterating):
Experts are very rarely in agreement so saying ‘let the experts decide’ or ‘we aren’t the taxonomists they are’ etc. isn’t good form, especially if the science itself is very new and not yet subjected to many tests. However, it’s true that iNat isn’t a taxonomic authority and for the sake of order should follow set external authorities. What really makes this unfortunately and unnecessarily difficult is the unfortunate trend in some academic circles recently for authors to push for their new and often still shaky taxonomy to be accepted without the rigorous peer review theories should be subjected to before they are generally used. I guess a big part of it is just ego.
For example, iNat’s authority for reptile taxonomy is the Reptile Database, which in turn uses the SSAR. The study iNat uses for the common kingsnake ‘complex’ is Pyron and Burbrink 2009, which has very sparse sampling and has methods which have been scientifically demonstrated to be unreliable. Furthermore, the study determines that only genetics can be used to ID formerly distinctive (sub)species, which makes it technically impossible to ID to the species on iNat. Despite virtually no peer review the study was quickly accepted by SSAR, probably because of the authors’ involvement with the organization. But we on iNat have to accept it because of the necessity of following a source.
My conclusion would be to follow iNat’s set authorities with little or no exception, but to also use complex taxons in circumstances where IDing to the species using iNat’s taxonomy is not practicable or is downright unscientific like the situation I described. I’ve suggested as much to Scott Loarie (the staff moderator for herp taxonomy, I understand that in most cases curators can implement taxonomy changes) in flags, but he either hasn’t noticed or doesn’t want to discuss it.
Science necessarily assumes that there is objective truth, otherwise there would be no point in any epistemology. However, science by definition does not treat with truth, but only with facts which can be disproven. Science is not the truth but the pursuit of truth, and while it helps our understanding, it will never ‘decide’ what is true, either autocratically or democratically. And science is very much ‘my opinion vs your opinion’, it’s just that opinions involved should be based upon fact. My point being that you’re correct that there is an objective truth as to what a species is, but science cannot ever make a statement as to the truth. But I digress lol
Scott is pretty busy and it’s not unusual for him to miss tags, so I wouldn’t assume anything if it’s just that he didn’t respond to a tag. Complexes are used for similar (I assume?) cases with herps, like Eastern/Grey Ratsnakes and Grey/Cope’s Treefrogs, so at least at surface level this seems like a pretty reasonable request. Unless rules have gotten more restrictive, but I feel like that’s more for birds than herps.
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.
Oh don’t get me wrong I’m not blaming Scott or anything. I’m sure he is busy, and even if he has noticed it looks from comments on flags an observations that he’s had the discussion many times over the years and at this point might just be tactfully ignoring them. I do wish I knew his thoughts tho, because as you point out the complex option is used with herps, and the situation with kingsnakes is even more complex (pun not intended…) than with ratsnakes and gray treefrogs imo. But I don’t want to derail from the actual thread
At the moment, I can only think of one example of a California plant species that was split back out based on genetics where the author did not provide a way to distinguish it morphologically and/or geographically. Most genetics-based splits that I am aware of are bringing back fairly distinct taxa that were erroneously lumped previously and/or are describing fairly distinct new taxa that have just been overlooked previously. These studies are often making it much clearer how to distinguish taxa that were confused in the past. Some of the distinguishing characters are obscure and perhaps not photographed much, but that is more of a problem with the photographer/observer than with the taxonomy.
The ideal situation is that identifiers on iNat would teach people what to photograph or at least look at to distinguish similar taxa. So you need to cross-section a leaf to distinguish some pine species now. So what? They are morphologically distinct. You need to cross-section moss leaves to ID many of those too. You need to dissect many insects to identify them. Most taxa are morphologically distinct if you take the time to look at what actually distinguishes them. Some taxa in the oaks and sedges are pretty messy but they already have complexes, sections, etc. to account for that. The bottom line is that some taxa are always difficult to ID and many taxa are difficult to ID if you don’t look at the correct characters to distinguish them.
Looking at and documenting the correct characters to distinguish them is a much better solution than making groups of taxa that are not closely related based on characters that don’t actually distinguish them or were mistakenly claimed to be useful for taxonomy in the past. Claiming that genetics is the only way to distinguish taxa and not bothering to educate yourself and others about the other differences is counterproductive. Educate people and you may get a lot more iNat observations that can be IDed to species, subspecies, or variety.
Related to that, rushing to do a taxonomic change on iNat before there is an easily accessible reference that you can show people that tells them how to distinguish taxa is problematic. Once someone makes that info available on Wikipedia, an open-access journal article, a website, an iNat journal post, etc. (ideally in multiple places), that is a good time to move forward with the change on iNat, assuming the evidence is fairly solid.
Unless you are specifically referring to California plants, this is unfortunately not always the case, especially in herp taxonomy. Often genetics and range are (allegedly lol) the only way to differentiate species. And range alone imo should not be used to ID on iNat, if there’s not actually a way to ID from the image. Honestly I think in many cases this is probably due to faulty genetic studies, because in general a divergence in genetics should result in divergent appearance (or often even be caused by divergent appearance in a manner of speaking- evolution because of some beneficial trait).
i deleted this post for me being too cranky, see posts below