Southern California botanists -- a few questions

Nature Talk
1

Hi there!

I’ve been doing some taxonomic research for a small project, and would benefit from some input with folks with years (or decades) or experience with plants in Southern California. I’ve been trying to trace nomenclature for plants in So Cal back for a few decades and it’s been a bit tricky since many name changes or shuffling of classifications were pre-internet. I’m looking for the taxonomic changes that a given organism has gone through. I’ve found some info using POWO, Jepson eFlora, calflora, two Munz books fom the 70s, and numerous random websites.

I’m hoping some of you with experience can help answer a few questions about the entries below.

  • Can you confirm seeing these changes over the years?
  • Were there intermediate names between the ones listed? If so, what were they and when did they appear?
  • Is the name listed as ‘current’ the name in common usage today?
  • For other name shake-ups (such as a family or order change), which plants were affected? What were they previously and when did the higher order change?
  • Is there a plant that has undergone significant taxonomic changes in the past decades that isn’t on this list? What is it? (I’m very interested in changes from the '70s, '80s, and '90s.)
  • Are any of these non-noteworthy?
  • Do you notice anything else that needs some editing?

Here are a few I’ve found:

California Fuchsia
old: Zauschneria californica (1831)
current: Epilobium canum subsp. canum (1976)

Rock Bush Monkeyflower
old: Mimulus longiflorus supsp. calycinus (1973)
current: Diplacus calycinus (2012)

Desert Spikemoss
old: Bryodesma eremophilum (1992)
current: Selaginella eremophils (1920) (date?)

Tecate cypress
old: Cupressus guadalupensis sub. forbesii (1978)
old: Callitropsis forbesii (2006)
current: Hesperocyparis forbesii (2009)

Western Honey Mesquite
old: Prosopis glandulosa subsp. torreyana (1982)
current: Neltuma odorata (2022)

Purple Owl’s Clover
old: Orthocarpus purpurascens (1835)
current: Castilleja exserta (1991)

Two-color Rabbit-tobacco
old: Gnaphalium bicolor (1893)
current: Pseudognaphalium bioletti (2022)

Yellow Clustered Broomrape
old: Aphyllon fasciculatum (1848) [taxonomic split]
current: Aphyllon franciscanum (2021)
(Was this plant subject to the Scophulareaceae split at a higher level?)

California Cordgrass
old: Spartina foliosa (1840)
current: Sporobolus foliosus (2014)

Old common name: Bush sunflower
Current common name: California Brittlebush
Is there a certain time frame when the former name went into disuse?

Mountain Fringepods
old:Thysanocarpus laciniatus vars. hitchcockii, laciniatus, rigidus (1932)
current: Thysanocarpus desertorum, T. laciniatus, T. rigidus (2013)

Chuckwalla Cholla
old: (misidentified) Cylindropuntia echinocarpa (1930)
current: Cylindropuntia chuckwallensis (2014)

Santiago Canyon Liveforever
old: (misidentified) Dudleya cymosa subsp. ovatifolia (1957)
current: Dudleya chasmophyta (2024)

Bladderpod
old: Cleome isomeris (1888)
old: Peritoma arborea (2007)
current: Cleomella arborea (2015)

Thanks in advance for your insight!

2

I don’t quite feel experienced enough to comment on the scientific name changes, but this jumped out at me. Why include common names? They may be harder to trace, and it’s probably difficult to categorize “current” usage since so much of it is colloquial. In my experience teaching environmental education programs in Orange County, for example, bush sunflower is still very much in use here informally, although I also hear California brittlebush sometimes.

3 Likes
3

I published a paper a few years back in which I needed to find data on dozens of species of plants and animals, and needed a few different types of data for each species. For a few species I had to chart out use of both common and Latin names in order to really know if two papers were describing the same population, because both varied over time.

3 Likes
4

Fascinating! I suppose in my limited experience the common names of plants have been so inconsistent (and, often, simply not even used) in publications that I assumed that most projects would steer clear of them.

Still the question is what, specifically, is the relevance for the OP? At the very least, per my previous note, the “old” common name in this case may still be in use… not sure if that’s equally true in the literature though, most of my research experience is bird rather than plant focused.

2 Likes
5

Not a botanist, just a plant enjoyer, but have you tried searching for these on tropicos.org? The results often show other historical names and searching for the older names on Google Scholar often gets you to the original papers/journals where the name change took place. A good entry with more than a few changes is Spanish Clover (Acmispon americanus).

1 Like
6

I’m just trying to track changes in how people refer to specific plants, whether by scientific or common names (mostly scientific, but I threw in one common namer). I’ve only ever heard Encelia californica referred to as brittlebush, so had assumed it had fallen from use. Glad to know others still use the other term!

1 Like
7

Thanks for the link! I had gone to mobot.org but hadn’t come across this database of theirs. It looks like some of the listed synonyms/basionyms are there for some plants but not all (two out of three on my test searches). But it looks like it could be a decent resource for future projects!

1 Like
8

Putting on my linguist hat for a moment, it seems like if you have a list of common names and you want to find out how use has changed over time, you would want to do a full-text search of relevant digitized material. This is what is referred to in linguistics as a text corpus.

There are various corpora available online, e.g. here: https://www.english-corpora.org/ You would have to look at what is included in each to see whether any of them are likely to be useful for your purpose. Some corpora may require registration or access via a subscribing library.

Another tool you could try for this sort of question is Google’s Ngram Viewer, which allows you to compare the relative frequency of two or more terms. It is essentially based on a full text search of all the content in Google Books, sorted by date. They’ve made some changes which means that it is no longer as easy to go from the graph to a list of results as it used to be, but it may be helpful for getting a sense of changes in use over time (at least, if the names are something that appear in the reference corpus – I don’t know how obscure these plant names are likely to be).

If you have access to a university library or archive, it is possible that they may have digitized collections of more specialized material – say, newsletters of local wildflower societies.

5 Likes
9

@arboretum_amy might have some information

1 Like
10

Thanks for those ideas, too. At this point in the project, I am past the point of further research and am now just looking for answers to the questions listed for the specimens listed.

11

Genus Mimulus was split into several different genera, I believe at least partially based on the work of Naomi Fraga at California Botanic Garden (formerly Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden.) Indeed almost nothing is left that’s still using the name Mimulus. The genera in question also moved to a new family Phrymaceae from Scrophulariaceae (Scrophulariaceae was heavily revised around that time, so a lot of groups were moved.)

Like @jmillsand I’m in Orange County and I’d say “bush sunflower” (or coastal bush sunflower or California bush sunflower) is the preferred common name of Encelia californica.

Between Cleome isomeris and Peritoma arborea it was known as Isomeris arborea. Its family has also changed.

2 Likes
12

I think the Munz books are an excellent place to start, along with previous editions of the Jepson (print copies) if you can get them. Actually there are fewer previous editions than I imagined: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jepson_Manual

In general, monocot families, monkey flower genera, and the families formerly in Scrophulariaceae have changed a lot. The Sambucus species native to Southern California seems particularly contentious, both in its species name and what family it is in.

I’ve only been paying attention to taxonomy since 2012. But my impression is that changes after 2012 have been very much more frequent than in the decades before that. How are you deciding which species or time frames are of interest?

2 Likes
13

A major useful source for tracing taxonomy is the Biodiversity Heritage Library, supported and hosted by the Smithsonian organization. It’s easy to search for a taxon name and the list of results will lead you to a chronological list of mentions of that taxon in their vast digitized literature archives. For instance, for your first species, Zauschneria californica, the search results includes a clickable link to a list of references. Clicking on “Date” column in the subsequent table of references puts them in chronological order and you’re off and running.

2 Likes
14

Which felt odd to me, because I have an old field guide in which Phryma leptostachya was the sole species in Phrymaceae.

15

California Cordgrass
old: Spartina foliosa (1840)
current: Sporobolus foliosus (2014)

This is a recent change (as you can tell both from its date and from comparing it to what the Jepson has). It’s based on DNA sequencing work. This work indicates that both the Spartina clade and the Crypsis clade arose within the clade we call Sporobolus. Therefore, is we want to be strict cladists, we either have to break up Sporobolus or include Spartina and Crypsis within that genus.

Crypsis and especially Spartina differ conpsicuously from Sporobolus as we used to understand it, so many of us are not pleased. Sooner or later, though, we’ll accept these changes.

2 Likes
16

You can find a lot of the information you want by consulting some major taxonomic databases and comparing the results to the Jepson Manual.

Note that “currently accepted” is a matter of opinion in many cases – it depends on who you consult.

POWO gives you the full synonymy – all the names that have been applied to that name. It also selects one as its “accepted name,” the one thought to be the most correct considering the rules of botanical nomenclature. POWO gives you both homotypic synonyms (based on the same type specimen) and heterotypic synonyms (those based on different types).

Homotypic synonyms tell you a lot about how the classification has changed, about names being shifted from one genus to another or changed from subspecies to species, etc.

Heterotypic synonyms tell you about people naming what they thought were new, different species, which we now consider to be the same thing. Early formal taxonomy involved a lot of names based on different synonyms because communication was so much poorer and Botanist A wouldn’t know what Botanist B had already named, etc.

W3Tropicos gives you homotypic synonyms and doesn’t make a judgement about which name is best. It does link to original descriptions in BHL (Biodiversity Heritage Library), which can be very handy.

You can consult the Jepson manual on-line through either Jepson Interchange or CalFlora to find out what name is currently accepted (or was accepted when the Jepson was last published) in California. Usually that name is the one generally accepted in the world, but not always.

3 Likes
17

Wheatgrasses (Triticeae) have been significantly reorganized, mostly in your time frame. It’s a switch from classification based only on morphology to one based in part on genomes. Oh, we love that! They’re so easy to see. Check out Agropyron and Elymus and what their species have become (such as the genera Leymus, Pseudoroegneria, Thinpyrum)

At one time, all needlegrasses were in one genus, Stipa. Now it’s been split into lots of genera and we don’t have any Stipa as natives in California any more. They’ve moved to Achnatherum (now changed to Eriocoma!), Jarava, Nassella, etc.

Both of these major grass groups have many representatives in southern California.

All of the family Orobanchaceae are parasitic or hemiparasitic plants that were once in Scrophulariaceae. Some species have been transferred between Castilleja (paintbrushes) and the closely related Orthocarpus, including S. California species.

The split of the family Scrophulariaceae not only moved the parasites out into their own family, but transferred most species to Plantaginaceae and fewer to several other families, including shifting Mimulus to Phrymaceae. And the genus Mimulus has been split, transferring most of the species to Erythranthe, some to Diplacus, and I think some elsewhere. Many of these species are in southern California.

2 Likes
18

Thanks for the responses!

2 Likes
19

Count me as one!

Or find a way to render the rest of Sporobolus into similarly diagnosable clades?

2 Likes
20

I hope so!

1 Like