A taxon with about 160 observations (145 mine) were swapped to a new species. The instigation of this was probably that the genus changed and the curator who implemented the swap read the text of a new species in that genus (where it mentions it is “widespread”) and assumed previous records were misidentified and moved records to the new species, rather than the same specific name under the new genus).
To fix this I am inclined to perform a taxon swap to move them into the correct species and then look through a few records only to see if they belong in the new species. Ideas?
I’m afraid I don’t have specific ideas for how to deal with this, but I would suggest including the taxa names in your post – specifics will give people a starting point to look into the situation.
I wasn’t being specific because it could be answered generally. :)
Torrendiella eucalypti became Hymenotorrendiella eucalypti but the swap was made to the recently described Hymenotorrendiella communis because it was mentioned in the paper that it was widespread. All my 145 observations of this are on Acacia melanoxylon host and I don’t want to go through all of them and then wait for at least another to re-identify them correctly as eucalypti.
The back and forth swaps are really disruptive, creating a lot of messy withdrawn IDs and confusion. It’s usually better to fix mistakes by reversing it than to swap back and forth.
It wasn’t strictly a back and forth swap, since it needed to be moved to a new genus anyway. I figured since even if it were undone it would need another swap, I might as well just do the swap. In the moment it seemed like a matter of two additional changes versus one, and I was trying to fix my blunder. It did leave a lot of withdrawn IDs, though. In the future, I can wait for the reversion before any other necessary swaps.