Stenopelmatus Update: Need Instructions for Change

Curators
#1

Stenopelmatus or Jerusalem Crickets had their whole genus revised a couple days ago. OSF, the external authority, hasn’t completed the changes but as of this post, the only thing they haven’t done are the species’ transfers. Here’s the deal:

– Stenopelmatus has been found to be a strictly Mexican/Central American genus.
– Ammopelmatus, a genus that previously had only 2 species will acquire all 16 US/Canada species (still many undescribed). That means we need to figure out how to transfer the 5,500 observations that are currently labelled as Stenopelmatus to Ammopelmatus.

I’ve never done this sort of thing yet but to me, the easiest route is to “split” Stenopelmatus with the output taxa being Stenopelmatus and Ammopelmatus, than atlasing them. All sightings within the ranges will be appropriately reassigned. Regions of overlap will be bumped to subfamily level. Is there an easier way to do this?

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#2

Not sure why you posted this in #feature-requests? Moved to #general for now.

#3

Shouldn’t have been, the intention was under the curator category.

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#7

Is the split reflected in Orthoptera Species File? That’s what iNat follows for orthoptera taxonomy.

#8

It’s slowly being implemented. I don’t know the technical kinks that need to be figured out on OSF but the paper was released Tuesday morning and by that evening OSF synonymized the genera, and the next morning they added new species S. chiapas and S. cusco. First forward another day and a half and all the new species are added along with all the species now considered nomen dubium. Only thing left is the US species transfers.

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#9

The change has now been fully implemented into OSF. This still leads to the question on how would some make the changes in id. Transferring the species will be easy enough but there’s very few RG sightings in the US because of undescribed species. So how will we change these thousands of sightings from Stenopelmatus to Ammopelmatus?

#10

Creating atlases for the genera Stenopelmatus and Ammopelmatus, and then committing a split of Stenopelmatus into Stenopelmatus and Ammopelmatus, should shift all genus-level Stenopelmatus IDs in the US and Canada to Ammopelmatus (and all genus-level Stenopelmatus IDs in Mexico [or just the specific states where the two genera co-occur depending on how detailed you want to make the atlas] up to Stenopelmatinae; Central American and Ecuadorian genus-level Stenopelmatus IDs wouldn’t change)

(Note that, while there isn’t a link on a genus’s taxon page to create an atlas like there is for species, you can still create atlases for genera starting from https://www.inaturalist.org/atlases/new instead)

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#11

The taxon swap for the genus seems to have worked. I also had initiated swaps for the various species that needed to be re-assigned. I’m not sure whether it happened at the genus or the species level, but the swaps seem to have negated disagreements on ID at the species level. This was brought to my attention for A. fuscus. For observations that were identified as Stenopelmatus fuscus and subsequently identified as Stenopelmatus but not Stenopelmatus fuscus are now all showing up as Ammopelmatus fuscus. This is affecting several hundred observations.

#12

Was it a disagreement? When someone identifies to genus, the pop-up will say:

Is there evidence provided enough to confirm this as A. fuscus?

“I don’t know but I’m sure this is Ammopelmatus”
“No, but it is a member of Ammopelmatus”

By clicking the top option, though your id will be at genus, the community id will still at species level so when the taxon swap was committed, it switched in accordance to taxon rank the community id is at.

#13

Let me see if I can explain better ;-)

Someone identified a JC as Stenopelmatus fuscus, I disagreed and identified it as Stenopelmatus but not Stenopelmatus fuscus and the community ID reverted to Stenopelmatus.

Post swap: it’s Ammopelmatus fuscus and my ID is Ammopelmatus but could be A. fuscus and the community ID is Ammopelmatus fuscus.

There are 200+ observations just in California affected. If this can’t be auto corrected each one will have to be revisited and identified as Ammopelmatus but not Ammopelmatus fuscus.

When the swap happened it negated somehow all the genus level identifications that disagreed with the finer level (species level) identifications.

#14

To make it clear, the correct species ID is still Ammopelmatus (not Ammopelmatus fuscus): I did not change my original determination but it was automatically changed during the taxon swap process.