I have been bringing this up for some time, and with the arrival of the Clements 2025 update in 7 days, we’re going to encounter more problems like this.
The Idea: Mammal Diversity Database and the Clements Checklist provide a complete list of common names for their databases. I believe that standardizing global default names to these resources is just as important as the binomial that we are typically required to adhere to.
Standardize Common Names of Mammals and Birds to their Taxonomic Source?
Yes
No
0voters
Pros: Names are concordant with the taxonomic source. It also follows what field guides are likely to going to be publishing in future publications. Additionally in a world of splitters and certain splits rendering old names obsolete, standardizing to sources can help keep two pins in place to show we are following the current taxonomy.
Cons: I know that a lot of people get irritated and unnecessarily angry over very subtle changes like Gray vs Grey or hypenated vs non-hypenated names, and this is usually caused by differences between Old and New World taxonomies. These databases are also managed by Americans, which I know is source of contention.
This is entirely unrelated to taxonomy. In the case of gray vs grey, it is purely a matter of:
a) effectively everywhere in the world uses ‘grey’ except the US, which uses ‘gray’
b) but, because
the ‘gray’ spelling gets used.
It makes zero sense to me for a global platform to foist the ‘gray’ spelling onto the rest of the world when it is only the US that uses it, and the only reason the taxonomic databases use that spelling is because they’re American-managed as we’ve established; not because that is the actual universal/standard name, and not for anything taxonomy related.
So there are three options on iNat in these cases:
Set ‘gray’ as the universal name to ‘standardise’ the name to our taxonomic source, making the rest of the world follow the Americanised spelling
Same as above, but then be forced to add regional names for all the other countries so they get to see ‘grey’ (but this is obviously totally unnecessary extra work)
‘Deviate’ from the source and set ‘grey’ as the universal name, and then simply implement a single extra action, which is to set ‘gray’ as the regional name for the US
Option 3 seems like the very obvious and logical choice to me: everyone gets to see the name that is used in their country, and it requires the minimum curation/additional work, a win-win situation.
So I see no need to rigidly enforce the standardisation of common names in the specific context of an example like this.
In the case of grey/gray, AviList uses “grey” while Clements (hosted in the US) uses “gray”.
Since AviList is eventually going to become the worldwide reference, I think it would be worth using its English names. Maybe then, it would be better to wait until all other lists (particularly the Clements) align with AviList to make these changes (at least, when AviList and Clements differ)
This. Standardizing based on Clements’ would be rather short-sighted in my opinion, since AviList is now the global standard (or will be soon, since Clements’, IOC, AviBase, BirdLife International all joined forces to make it such).
There’s another option. Use “gray” for birds native to the western hemisphere, and “grey” for birds in the eastern hemisphere. I believe that will comport generally with predominant english usage in each hemisphere. Both spellings, by the way, were in common usage before America was even a colony. So calling “gray” “americanized” is incorrect.
For Canadians it is generally more proper to use British spelling although many people do use American spelling. As far as I know Guyana and much of the Caribbean uses British English as well.
So even in the Western Hemisphere I think this is true:
AviList does have standardized common names, and if you look at their Excel checklist, they list three names; AviList name, Clements name, and BirdLife name. They appear to finding comprises between both lists but tend to be following the UK names, and here’s just some examples if we elected to standardize such names.
I don’t understand the sand-plover decision there, the AviList choice makes the meaning of the name more ambiguous. Is it for a similar reason to the recent AOS/Clements “night-heron”->“night heron” change?
I would just like to add that I disagree with the framing of the thread/poll, specifically:
Casting this general topic as a “problem” from the jump isn’t a good way to to initiate a balanced discussion about the pros and cons of an issue or seek unbiased feedback from a group.
A similar biased framing is present later in the initial post with
It’s not necessary to preemptively judge whether other users’ feelings are justified or not in order to have a discussion about a topic. Dismissing other users’ feelings about an issue from the beginning is not a good way to initiate a constructive community discussion.
By common names, do you mean common names in English? Or is the proposal to create a process for all the world’s languages, or for some subset thereof? In the case of English, the language is used by 1.5-2 billion people in 180+ countries, often influenced by hundreds of years of tradition and local knowledge and ecology. eBird and iNaturalist both have tools to accommodate regional names and spelling variations and let people choose their language and regional preferences—a necessary and valuable thing, IMO. Scientific names already serve the purpose of international standardization. English names (and common names in other languages) do not need to do the same thing.
Future versions of AviList will include an official AviList English name decided upon by a newly established English Names Committee commencing its work after the release of version 2025. Even so, the AviList team does not feel that there needs to be only a single prescribed common name for each species, and future AviList versions may display additional widely used alternative English names. Note also that eBird (www.ebird.org) and Birds of the World (birdsoftheworld.org) allows users to set their preferences to any of almost 100 non-English alternate common names as well as regional alternative English names; additionally, Birds of the World provides a link to names that display all the official alternate names in multiple languages (e.g., for Osprey click the “names (81)” link, between IUCN Red List status and “Subspecies”, so see the 81 common name alternatives for Pandionhaliaetus.)
They’re just using the IOC names as placeholders right now. They plan to have a list of common names in the future, but they also plan to list multiple names per species when they do.
There might be a bit of a misunderstanding here: the default English names of AviList v2025 are in the vast majority of cases just the preexisting IOC common names[1] (with a small number of exceptions including species not yet split/lumped in IOC v15.1, in which cases the AviList names are what the IOC names would’ve been). An English names committee will be established for future versions of AviList, but the first version didn’t involve “finding [compromises among the three] lists” in terms of default common names. (This is explained in multiple places on the AviList website: 123)
(The IOC English names themselves reflect to some extent a compromise for species with multiple established English names: some species get the American or otherwise non-British name [e.g., loons instead of divers, including common vs. great northern and yellow-billed vs. white-billed as the descriptors for G. immer and G. adamsii, respectively; jaegers instead of skuas, including parasitic vs. Arctic as the descriptor for S. parasiticus; red vs. grey phalarope; horned vs. Slavonian grebe; Lapland longspur vs. bunting; common and thick-billed murre vs. common and Brünnich’s guillemot], others get the British or otherwise non-American name [e.g., grey vs. black-bellied plover, black-necked vs. eared grebe, sand martin vs. bank swallow, little auk vs. dovekie, rough-legged buzzard vs. hawk, Siberian tit vs. gray-headed chickadee], and a few get a little of both [such as black-throated loon, instead of black-throated diver or Arctic loon, and brant goose, instead of brent goose or brant]. As for spelling differences, the list standardizes some words [like grey] to the British spelling, and others [like color] to the US spelling [but its guidelines on this also encourage users of the list to use whatever spelling is appropriate for a given situation]. edit: AviList will likely continue in future versions to list multiple alternate English names where they exist—see above links and previous comments posted while i was typing this)
It’s because the IOC checklist (which the AviList English name column corresponds to—see above) follows an entirely different set of rules for hyphenating English names than Clements/AOS (and HBW/BLI for that matter).
IOC restricts hyphens to “bird-bird” group names, like hawk-eagle, as well as some “a-b” names where the bird in question isn’t a part of the group(s) referred to by b alone, such as painted-snipe and stone-curlew (as well as other compound names which would otherwise would be a single word but in these particular cases that’d be difficult to parse due to length or awkward letter combinations, like white-eye, bee-eater, thick-knee, or foliage-gleaner, but that’s the case for all lists). All two-word collective names involving any non-bird word and a bird group (that the bird in question belongs to), such as sand plover, are unhyphenated.
I’m unsure whether the hyphenation practices of the Clements checklist are formally codified, but for the most part Clements has tended to align with e.g. NACC and SACC in generally following Parkes (1978), with hyphens typically used to denote relationships: some (but not all) two-word collective names that correspond to a clade are hyphenated (e.g., whistling-duck), while two-word names that have been hyphenated in the past but which don’t correspond to monophyletic groups have the hyphen removed[2] (e.g., night heron, black hawk, ground dove).
The HBW/BLI checklist has its own set of hyphenation practices. Again, i’m not sure these are formally written down somewhere, but it seems that many if not most two-word names that have long been hyphenated, and/or that would be more clearly understood with a hyphen, retain a hyphen (so, for example, reed-warblers, leaf-warblers, bush-warblers remain as-is, whereas Clements removed those hyphens a little while back because not all birds with each of those terms in its common name form respective monophyletic groups, and IOC didn’t hyphenate them from the start); however, there are also cases where hyphens have been removed following widespread adoption of the unhyphenated form (e.g., ground dove, black hawk), and i’m not sure if there’s any pattern to when this happens. (HBW/BLI has its own capitalization guidelines as well: the second part of a hyphenated name is always lowercase, unlike in other lists where it’s capitalized if it’s a bird group to which the species in question belongs. Furthermore, unlike IOC and Clements, which standardize variable spellings to one particular option across the board, in at least one case—color vs. colour—HBW/BLI standardizes the spelling by region, using the former for birds in the Americas and the latter for birds elsewhere. On the topic of sand-plover vs. sand plover, they use a third option: sandplover.)
(A fourth set of rules that’s been proposed is to hyphenate “noun-bird” but not “adjective-bird” names, resulting in, say, night-heron, sea-eagle, and sand-plover on the one hand, and whistling duck, diving petrel, and collared dove on the other.)
(when someone catches it and proposes doing so, that is. there are still a number of hyphenated names in Clements [and some in the NACC and SACC lists for that matter] that have been known for some time to not correspond to clades but have yet to be addressed) ↩︎
A couple of Neotropical bird field guides I use (e.g. Mexico and Colombia) were authored by Brits or authors with British ties and they use “grey” in these Western Hemisphere publications. Dispite any other imperialist tendencies we (certain of us in the U.S.) may have, I like the “U.S. exception” as a better alternative, rather than extrapolating the U.S. American usage of “gray” to other “New World” nations.
I don’t think that accurately reflects what I’m trying to get accomplished. There are numerous open flags in both avian and mammalian taxonomy where nobody can agree on a global default English name, and it gets bitter really quickly. And I try my best to interject with, “Why don’t we use the name provided by the taxonomic source?” and I get chewed out over it.
I want to see if we can agree on a set of rules for English common names so that way we can stop arguing over these things and start closing out these flags. The reason why I want to get it done sooner than later is because the latest Clements update is taking on some unpopular names. For example, Clements is splitting the Whimbrel. What common name are we going to use for the American species? Clements is using Hudsonian Whimbrel, but the species was described 1790 with the common name Hudsonian Curlew and was the name largely used until it was lumped with the Whimbrel.
Similarly, the Yellow Warbler is being split. Clements has chosen Northern Yellow Warbler for the migratory US/Canadian populations, and Mangrove Yellow Warbler for the residential Central/South American populations. This to me feels unnecessary because nearly no US birder is going to see the Mangrove species, so why change the names, especially since there is no Mangrove Warbler that would cause conflictions. What name are we going to use for iNaturalist? If we are going to use Northern Yellow Warbler, why aren’t we standardizing all names? And if we’re going to maintain Yellow Warbler for North America, what is the threshold for changing and not changing default common names?
Why would no US birder see the Mangrove Warbler? They occur in two states and also occur very widely throughout the Neotropics, where people from the US frequently travel. That all being said I absolutely think they should have called them “American Yellow Warbler” and “Mangrove Warbler”. Or even better, they could have Northern “Summer Warbler” instead.
Unless you live in Corpus Christi or Miami, you need money and time in order to do that. For a vast majority of US birders, they are not going to get Mangrove Warbler, including myself. So comes the question, why are we changing the name for Yellow Warbler? Especially since the southern populations can be simply called Mangrove Warbler?
Why should people care about common names on iNaturalist anyway? As long as enough of the most frequently used (in the real world, colloquially—not on very specific sites) common names and assign them to the appropriate lexica it isn’t an issue. Scientific names and their connection to common names are important, but people should be memorizing the scientific names of organisms whenever possible so that they can communicate the most standardized information to one another. I don’t tell non-iNatters the common names of birds (in an identification situation) very often if I know their genus or species because they should be using what is standard.
People will be arguing about common names of their favorite species for a long time. They should be allowed to call organisms whatever they want in their head and make up personal names that please them, but when they talk with other people on a website with other people there’s no need to say “oh look at this ” when the basis of the website involves science.
The mammal and bird common names should be left to other sources. Updating them for iNaturalist only serves to help people unfamiliar with scientific names participate in the identification process. iNaturalist has so many lexica to choose from, so if they want to have an easier time navigating the service without opening a browser to see what the common name of a scientific name is we have the option to change lexica and site language to be the most appropriate/understandable for the user. However, the overreliance on common names and trying to standardize common names when scientific ones are just fine (except for people who have difficulties processing language, which we should attempt to appeal to before naming a fly Parastratiosphecomyia stratiosphecomyioides) needs to stop.
