Yep, I’m just talking about California plants. I can’t speak to animals or other locations. I know there have been a lot of DNA studies that were poorly sampled and not associated with morphological data that made a lot of messes, particularly older DNA studies that led to unjustified lumpings. Poor sampling is still a big problem with many studies, but it is at least getting better. That said, I suspect that the number of studies making taxonomic changes that result in identification problems are very much a minority compared to those that help solve previously existing problems. My big issue is when people complain about taxonomic changes as a whole, particularly splits, when the majority of them are making everything easier, at least for people willing to put in the effort of learning why the changes were made and how to tell the taxa apart. In the plant world, we’ve been coming out of a very long period weighted towards taxonomic lumping, some of which was likely very justified, but a lot of which made for some very big messes that taxonomists are just starting to clean up with the added evidence from DNA studies.
the other thing missing from your posts is that time and resources are very limited in this field and people who are spending all their time re-learning plants every year aren’t actually doing conservation work. No one is mailing out a free hardcopy Jepson with updated keys for each new taxa, they are hidden somewhere in some paper some of us don’t even have access to. Sigh. You say a minority of these changes cause problems, but you seem to mean they don’t cause problems for you. I don’t think you are malicious in any way but if you don’t see the problem at all, and think i’m making it up, why engage at all? and how do you then explain others who come in and make very similar posts to me without me ever talking to them?
someone was literally running around redoing the sedge sections based on unpublished papers recently, breaking a bunch of observations. So those aren’t left alone by the splitting, revision frenzy either.
in regards to genetically imperfect groups: no one is proposing making them mandatory so you don’t need to use them.
@keirmorse i’m sorry i got frustrated and probably came off rude in those posts. What i want to clarify now is i respect you and your research and i am not at all saying it is worthless or that other taxonomic research doesn’t have value to advance our understanding of evolution. My only point is, taxonomic splitting and revisionism, of the form that is currently occurring, doesn’t belong on iNaturalist and often doesn’t work for some forms of field ecology so gets ignored anyway. At least in the short term. You might not agree with the supposed wave of lumping that has happened, but in absense of quick and easy field identification, split species concept is always going to be tweaked or ignored in settings like community science and some forms of applied field ecology, so it’s better to come up with something better, instead of applying the highest splitty standards to this website. In short, the research is valuable, but my opinion is the rapid changes and splits associated with it don’t belong here on iNaturalist at the species level. I’m traveling for a few days and won’t be checking this forum which is probably good beause i’m clearly getting too riled up again. Have a good holiday. I hope southern California finally gets some rain.
@Charlie with all due respect it seems like you are saying that the golden standard is to not have taxonomic changes at all because of difficulties for conservation. I absolutely respect the reasons for that, but you can’t just expect taxonomists to not do their job, and it would be counterintuitive to allow taxonomy to stay stagnant despite our constantly increasing knowledge of taxa and taxonomy. iNat should facilitate IDing, but not by simply ignoring facts. I think this is why complex taxons are useful compromises. Happy Holidays y’all!
Thankfully, the changes are coming out now at a slow steady pace, which is way easier to keep up with than historically when a new flora would come out after 30 years and we’d be hit by hundreds of changes all at once.
It’s the digital age, so there may never be another hardcopy Jepson. Thankfully, it is free here online and includes updates every year. You can find a list of major updates here and minor ones plus errata here.
This, of course, only has California plants and has many treatments that are still years out of date as they haven’t gotten someone to revise them yet. You will note though that I have advocated multiple times that major taxon changes on iNat not happen until there are easy to access resources available to help people distinguish the taxa. Just because a paper is behind a paywall doesn’t mean someone can’t put the important information from that article on Wikipedia before making a taxon change on iNat.
I agree that some taxonomic changes that have happened on iNat have been rushed without making the proper resources for ID easily available and some shouldn’t have happened at all as the studies they were based on were not good enough. Many were very appropriate though. iNaturalist is citizen science and should thus follow the science. It’s a wonderful platform for learning about science and collecting data to inform science. Taxonomic changes on the platform, when done well, are a great opportunity to educate users about science regarding what has been happening in the research and what still needs to be done. It also great for educating people about the reality that identifying certain groups of taxa is really difficult, can take a lot of time, and may need experts. That’s science. Most people, including myself, ignore bryophytes because they are difficult and time consuming to identify. Should they be ignored? Definitely not, but we often don’t have the time and resources needed to properly address them. Just because some taxonomic groups are easy to identify doesn’t mean all others can or should be. I’m sure many people finding these difficulties on iNat are inspired to learn more and thus contribute more to science because of it.
I agree. When complexes fit into iNat taxonomic structure, they can be very useful. What is not useful is pushing for complexes based on certain morphological characters that do not fit within the taxonomic structure. Some morphological characters historically used for ID have been shown to be misleading about the relationships of taxa. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other morphological character that can used. People stuck on past morphological ideas just need to readjust and focus on other characters that actually do hold those taxa together as a group, even if they are obscure characters.
That only solves half of the problem Charlie mentioned. Even with the yearly updates to the online Jepson, the problem remains: people who are spending all their time re-learning plants every year aren’t actually doing conservation work. He has been trying to get this message across from every angle he can think of, and it seems like nobody cares except those engaged in conservation work.
Without conservation, you won’t have any taxa left to split.
To provide another datum, Flora Novae Angliae (the basis of the GoBotany website) was published in 2011, covering “approximately 3,500 species” in 973 printed pages. The sole update so far (November 2022) can be seen here: https://gobotany.nativeplanttrust.org/updates/ It is a 35-page PDF, covering both taxonomic changes and new discoveries, alien and native, over 11 years.
I would gently encourage readers to follow some of these links to updates so that you can see for yourself the amount of taxonomic change that’s occurring before forming an opinion. [edited to be a bit less provocative]
I am engaged in conservation work and have been for over 25 years now. In many cases, including the genus I spent 7 years researching, a lot of rare taxa were recklessly lumped into more common taxa, which is a common and very problematic conservation issue. There are currently 20 taxa in that genus that have a California Rare Plant Rank and most of those weren’t recognized by the lumper even though he said it was perfectly justifiable to recognize them. He just didn’t want to. The common name of one that was presumed extinct when I started my research was even applied to the biggest lumping for about 30 years. I’m still trying to get databases to stop calling one of the most common species by the name of one of the most rare.
I have heard Charlie’s message over and over, and while he does have some very good points at times that are very valid in some select situations, I find them often extreme and at odds with any of the conservation work I’ve done and do. Most of the taxonomist I know are doing conservation work so that the necessary information gets out there to help these taxa that some people would prefer to ignore.
As far as relearning plants every year go, that’s what field botanists do. We recorded well over 1000 taxa on the project I was working on last year in a region that I’m pretty familiar with. Even though I’m pretty familiar with the region, I had to learn some new ones and relearn many I’ve learned before. So, no big deal if there are a few changes each year. Those changes often (not always) make things easier. I identified multiple taxonomic issues as well this year that I’m very hopeful that a taxonomist will take on and clarify. From a conservation standpoint, I’d say taxonomy is moving very slowly compared to what it should be.
Yes, there are plenty of examples of problematic taxonomic changes going on but I think that likely the majority are very much helping rather than hurting conservation. And, there definitely should be good discussions before major changes are made precisely because some may be problematic. I’m just very concerned there are people that are pushing against very important changes just because it is inconvenient to them despite the importance of these changes for improving conservation.
Sorry, I edited that last post after realizing it was a bit more provocative and contradictory than I had intended.
I get a bit persnickety on these threads because I think they’re surfacing valid complaints, but I think the complaints are often mis-described. My point here is not to say “the rate of change in the flora is small, therefore your feelings are of no account” but that “the rate of change in the flora is small, therefore there must be a more accurate way to describe why you find it harder to do field botany”.
To give an example from temperate North America that we discussed in a pretty productive thread a year or two ago, the current iNat taxonomy and some floras (FSUS; not Haines/GoBotany) elevate former subspecies of Arisaema triphyllum, jack-in-the-pulpit, to species level. That’s not a huge change in statistical terms, but it has a disproportionate impact on field botany here, because A. triphyllum s.l. is fairly common and widely distributed, and this knocks a lot of individuals into the “unidentifiable to species” bucket because you need a flowering specimen now for species ID, which limits you to certain plants and certain times of year. Does that create issues? Absolutely. It’s one of those “important, high profile taxa” named in the thread title, IMO. But the split is not based on genetic differences–it’s based on subtle morphological differences mostly observed in the field (I would feel better if there were genetic data backing it up, although apparently one of my acquaintances has been accumulating some).
I’m not saying this just for the pleasure of nitpicking. If we decide that things like splitting jack-in-the-pulpit require us to make social and/or technological changes in how we do taxonomy on iNat, then it’s really important to understand exactly which taxonomic changes are a problem and why. If we don’t accurately describe the problem and its causes, then the changes we make won’t adequately fix it.
Charlie, I’m not clear on whether you think splitting Jack-in-the-Pulpit is a problem or not for conservation and field work. Jacks were split into three species in the late 1970s, when my copy of Newcomb’s field guide was published. By the mid-1980s, those three were lumped (Seymour, 2nd printing, 1985; Gleason and Cronquist, 1991). More recently, they were split again. I don’t know anywhere near enough to have an opinion on whether there really are three species or just one, but as a retired conservation biologist, I certainly want to know if any of the three taxa, whether species or sub-species or varieties, are of conservation concern. Calling the taxa “species” may actually make the conservation work easier, because non-biologists seem to value the concept of species more easily than sub-species or varieties, but it doesn’t really matter what taxonomic level these entities are called by biologists of whatever sort - if the taxa are rare, let’s survey for them, determine their management needs, and get cracking on conserving them.
And without taxonomy conservation would be pointless; taxonomy identifies the species and subspecies which conservation seeks to protect. As I said above, you can’t just ignore scientific facts for the sake of conservation.
In parts of the world, conservationists are (slowly, painfully, slightly) moving away of the usual taxa-centric view - with the added benefit of evading some taxonomy-related issues. Taxonomy still has a place and use nevertheless.
What do you mean by that? Are you talking about conservation of ecosystems not of individual organisms? If that’s what you mean, there are pros and cons to that just like with a species-centric view. The benefits of preserving certain charismatic species that the unwashed masses (lol) can appreciate, is that if that species is protected then so is its ecosystem, and it’s much easier to get people to protect a cute bird or mammal than what they might perceive as an ugly wasteland. Anyway the issue of this thread is about species/taxonomy-based conservation. Let me know please if I misunderstood you lol
Yes, it should be discussed
I need to start with stating that taxonomy is important, allowing us to comprehend the tree of life and to have a shared understanding of how to call a select group of organisms.
Synonyms can also be useful, bringing together slightly different taxonomies.
Nature does not fit neatly into taxonomy. There are morphologically and genetically diverse populations of mostly endemic taxa,
Two grasses of the same genus were described about 1000 km apart. Since then, intermediate form have been collected between those locations. These two taxa are still there with the treatment describing the intermediate forms. This is one way to deal with it.
Rosulabryum billardierei is so variable across it’s range that distant specimens don’t even resemble each other. They are all treated as a single taxa (some isolated populations might be split off in a future, I read “more work needs to be done”)
Sometimes it is obvious that a change is coming, when different local taxonomies did not align for example. Some splits are really painless, when spp are elevated to taxa.
Brain surgery needs to finish within hours. Taxonomy is different, I think rushing is detrimental. Scientist can publish papers, books and monographies splitting, lumping or anything in between - that’s their job, they are entitled to their theories. It takes time to get these tested one way or another. Authorities are a different beast, with influences other than scientific.
There should be no taxon lumping whatsoever and no taxon split if possible. If there are no spp to map the original taxa before merging just wait. In a similar manner, elevating spp is preferred to a taxon split out of the blue. I know the later is not always possible.
Genus splits are sometimes even more painful. I often wonder if all of those are really needed and what’s the benefit.
Synonyms can be very useful but often they are just lumping in disguise.
I am not proposing voting for taxon changes but some sort of feedback might be useful. If enough people scream that it is a rushed, incomplete or detrimental change and point out the consequences some of the worst might not proceed.
Also an early warning would be useful, maybe by subscription.
Was just pointing out that there’s more to conservation than “protecting species” (entire checklists thereof, or umbrella/charismatic ones) – landscape conservation or ecosystem conservation can cope with limited taxonomic information. Should such approaches to conservation thrive, let’s hope the taxo peeps out there – if not extinct by then – have a spare argument ready to justify their job to the average taxpayer ;)
@charlie I have clicked on “like” on your first message here but let me say that not only changes regarding what you call “very important, high profile taxa” (by the way, why should certain taxa be less important or low profile?) should be exhaustively discussed. There are taxa, especially subspecies, that are rarely observed in iNat but may be endemics, rare, threatened, typical of a given environment, invasive, etc. Depending on the treatment they could simply disappear in our taxonomy.
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.
Nope, but I would suggest that they try to learn the new taxa as they slowly trickle in. Most people are working on a state or smaller level, which means the changes are coming in pretty slowly for them. The ponderosa pine one is a great example one that is easy for most people. Unless you are working in one of the fairly small areas where a couple taxa overlap, you know exactly which taxon you have as they mostly don’t occur together. Yeah, you could focus on the difficult morphological characters to distinguish them or you could just trust that it is unlikely for species that mostly do not occur near each other to be found well outside their known ranges.
I miss most. I think we can all agree the lack of notifications before changes is problematic.
I personally have no issue with paraphylletic morphological groupings as long as they fit within the taxonomic structure and there is a solid argument to use that particular grouping over other alternatives that may be just as useful/logical. The problem is they are sometimes somewhat or very arbitrary related to morphological characters than do show evolutionary relationships or they clutter up the taxonomic structure. In very large genera, it is very nice to have groups between the species. There is no question about that. Every situation is different though.
Most of the people doing conservation work I know are not taxonomist but most of the taxonomist I know entered taxonomy because they saw such a huge need for it while doing conservation work. That certainly was the case for me.
I would say most taxonomists would agree with that, at least those I am familiar with.
You could call the four new species splits I guess but I think the rest are better referred to as unlumps.
I can’t speak to the rest as I mostly follow locally relevant taxonomy but the ponderosa pine one seemed to make a lot of sense based on what I saw.
Maybe the east coast is way different than California, but I feel like there are very few changes to keep up with here, especially when only focusing on one region. We just have such a high diversity that it is hard to learn and remember everything. That is, of course, one of the main reasons I like field botany. There is great variety and I will hopefully keep running into taxa that I don’t already know or that are challenging to figure out.
I have been working on a project that tries to stick with USDA Plants taxonomy, which may not have been updated in 20+ years. Now that is a nightmare. That taxonomy is so out of date, full of errors, and missing so many taxa that it is almost unusable, at least in California. That said, if you are focusing on a long-term study, there is no reason you can’t lock your taxonomy for that study to something like USDA Plants or a printed flora that never changes. You can do whatever you want with your data.
It seems like we actually agree on most things so i want to pivot towards a more positive tone instead of my common cranky one that pisses people off and doesn’t serve much purpose :) The ponderosa pine thing i primarily object to in the context of a citizen science site. I admit i haven’t explored the west outside of California in great detail and did think the ‘ponderosa’ pines in New Mexico looked different than those in the Sierras, but i just disagree with the species level difference without a separate pseudo-species category to keep the old ponderosa pine concept, which is so key to just use of this site in that region. Like it is if you said physicists can’t use the word ‘atom’ any more and have to delete it from all documents. Even if there’s a good reason for that, you’re going to have to work with people to make it disruptive or it will just be viewed (by me at least) as harmful, pedantic interference with getting work done. So i guess broadly, how do we get curators to take creating sections and such more seriously and get them to at least consider doing them with every split? Even if we wind down their use 5-10 years after a split, in the cases the split isn’t reversed, creating them would make it a lot easier for those of us who aren’t splitters to learn what has been done to taxonomy by splitters (ur un-lumpers) and decide if it’s usable for our projects or not. I do think it’s important to reemphasize though that lumpers aren’t somehow lazier, we just want the energy directed somewhere else than species-level splitting. For me it’s getting to and surveying (with reasonable taxonomy) and mapping every wetland i can. Most in Vermont have never had any kind of inventory and if taxonomy changes cost me 3 field days a year that’s 3-20 wetlands that never get on the map (depending on survey type, etc). I’d rather have them on the map and a polyphylletic species concept for a goldenrod in the species list. And my goal is for iNat to be more usable to everyone not just taxonomic splitters.I wanted iNat to be my ‘field notebook’ for all the new wetlands, and it doesn’t work well for that any more. of course i don’t use the rapid updates on the database i manage, but since iNaturalist does now, i can’t use iNaturalist for work very easily any more. And it does seem like some people don’t mind the changes and it doesn’t bother them, but i want to just be clear in saying it DOES mess up my work flow and make iNat less usable to me, and I HAVE talked to more than a few others who feel the same way. I have no idea whether it’s the majority or minority view on the site broadly,. since this forum is more frequented by taxonomists than the main site. But it’s absolutely not just me who takes issue with how iNat does taxonomy.
i do think there are productive ideas in this thread such as a better notification process and expanded use of section level groupings for splits beyond what POWO uses. I don’t have an issue with ‘preferring’ monophylletic ones along with a tolerance for some polyphylletic ones (or is it paraphylletic? sorry) for important, large taxa that have really well- known characters that no longer work in new taxonomy.
But then that gets us to the even bigger problem that curators don’t have any oversight at least for vascular plants in North America and usually just yell at me and call me lazy or unscientific if i ask them not to make the latest split. So how do we get these ideas to trickle into the actual taxonomic framework of iNat? Can we get the admins’ attention on this? Clearly i am not a good lumper advocate on the site because i just make people mad, can we get some policy change instead so i don’t have to be? I don’t like getting stuck getting mad about this either, this also removes me from surveying a wetland or at least drawing a polygon on GIS (since it’s winter and i can’t do regular sureys now)
I don’t envy you having to go through PLANTS taxonomy, it is indeed a tangle of messes. But the fact that people prefer to keep using that mess over the constantly changing splitter taxonomy tells you something too… and there really does seem to be middle ground we can find that won’t make the lumpers overjoyed but at least won’t be so excluding of those who aren’t very active taxonomists and splitters.
Thanks and happy holidays!
Write up a draft policy change that actually works for the majority of people and make a clear and simple feature request for it that can be discussed there. Just note that lots of people are using this site for lots of reasons. What makes things easy for one person’s projects makes things difficult for another’s. The fact that iNat tries to have a single worldwide taxonomic framework means essentially no one will ever be perfectly happy with it as what is very important in some regions or for some projects make things very difficult for other regions or projects.
You could also get some more forum discussions going addressing specific issues with specific examples and actual data. You make a lot of broad generalizations that frankly do make you sound “lazy and unscientific” at times. Give us some real data. You work in Vermont wetlands. What has actually changed in those areas in the past year that has made life so difficult for you? How many taxon changes have there been? How many of those were just 1 to 1 name changes? How many new taxa were added? How many splits actually occurred where there was one species that is now more than one in your area and how are those distinguished? How many actually can only be distinguished with DNA? I want to see real numbers and real examples. It sounds like you are working in limited habitat in a relatively small region, which makes it somewhat astonishing that you can’t keep up when I’ve been working across all of southern California where there are 1000s of species and a vast diversity of habitats. Yeah, there are plenty of taxa that are difficult to ID here but that mostly because some groups are difficult and always have been, and because some still need a researcher to take them on to sort out the taxonomic issues. And, if you are working in an area with such a short field season, why aren’t you collecting specimens of the difficult taxa to be IDed in winter and then deposited into an herbarium. One of the biggest benefits I remember from when I lived up north was that there was so much extra time in the off-season to catch up of things like that.