I suspect this is more of a “taxon swap done incorrectly post” but because it is likely to happen regularly I figured I’d post it here (as well as commenting on the swap in question) in case there can be a work-around to prevent it from happening in the future.
There was a recent taxon swap that moved Geum fragarioides to Waldsteinia fragarioides. The problem is, if there were any IDs made at the Genus level, those would all of a sudden (after the swap) become conflicting identifications and could move the record from Research Grade to Needs ID. The only way this could be avoided is if the swap had been done at the Genus level.
Here’s an example where this recently happened (note that the record is now Research Grade because the original genus-level ID was withdrawn by the observer): https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/32302516
Like I said, not sure if this is totally expected and the “bug” lies with the swap being done at the species level when it should have been at the genus level, or if this is indeed a unforeseen consequences of a swap done the normal way.
I don’t think that follows. I just IDed the record in question as Geum and it didn’t affect the RG. (I immediately withdrew it, of course.)
Once the two species IDs have been made, the previous (and subsequent) different genus IDs don’t seem to matter. Although I guess the only way to be sure is if @widunlop tries to restore his Geum identification.
It was @widunlop who alerted me to this issue. It was stuck as “needs ID” until he withdrew the original ID, after which it became Research Grade.
If you add an ID with a different genus then it should absolutely reduce the ID to the lowest common ancestor, which in this case should be the Tribe Colurieae. If it doesn’t then that’s a separate issue of iNaturalist not behaving how it should.
I believe the correct way to have done this would have been to do a taxon split of Geum into Geum and Waldensteinia, which I think should have changed all identifications of Geum (55751) to the parent. You could also use atalses to narrow down identifications in some parts of the world, but I think in this case the two genera overlap so broadly that it may be pointless.
I’m not sure if the split should have used the existing Geum taxon (55751) as one of the outputs, or if a new taxon should have been created for the more narrow circumscription.
Hello,
I hope I didn’t cause any unnecessary problems with my taxon swap.
As I understand it, there is always a problem when the obs first got an ID at genus level (Geum) and later at species level (Geum fragarioides). After the swap Geum fragarioides to Waldsteinia fragarioides the first ID (Geum) gets wrong and the obs falls back to Tribus Colurieae. I hope this doesn’t affect a lot of observations.
However I don’t know how to prevent the problem. I mean all other procedures would have caused even bigger problems. But maybe I don’t understand it properly.
If targeting just the genus-level IDs, one would want to be careful not to include any child taxa in the split (if that is even possible for a genus split?).
Creating a new narrower Geum would require re-parenting all the species remaining in the genus. I don’t know if that would occur automatically or not, hopefully so. And hopefully it wouldn’t leave behind a bunch of redundant taxon change IDs on all the observations of those species.