Here’s the story: Pectiantia was lumped into Mitella via a taxon swap in 2018 in accordance with Plants of the World Online. The name was later recreated in Oct 2022 under a different taxon ID (probably in reaction to this flag ). Though evidently not accepted in 2018, Pectiantia is currently acce…

I don’t think there is any going back and re-activating the inactivated Pectiantia, especially since the circumscriptions could have changed in the interim. Definitely wouldn’t be able to revert the old swap this far down the road. I haven’t ever tried, but I’m also guessing there would be no “re-…

It’s possible to do a split on Mitella and bump everything which is currently identified at the genus level up to the tribal level see here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/new-tool-for-analyzing-unintended-disagreements-caused-by-thinning-parents/31970 It looks like doing so would affect over 500 …

[image] jdmore: I haven’t ever tried, but I’m also guessing there would be no “re-swapping” of the inactivated Pectiantia into the new version. Seems like it would create a data mess with the old taxon swap. But I’d love to be wrong, because otherwise that might fix the disagreement issue. I …

Also, moving forward, do either of you have ideas on how we could prevent this situation in the future? As I mentioned above, I probably would have done the same thing, but now that I know the problems it could cause, I’d like to figure out how to modify my process if I can.

[image] nathantaylor: I’m kind of curious to know what would happen if I committed it. I can’t really think of anything bad that would happen, but perhaps I’m not that imaginative. It would only affect the 2 observations where I assume the observer must have opted out of taxon swap updates. I…

The problems are fairly minimal considering the scope of the changes that were put through. To my knowledge, we don’t really have the tools to do a “resurrection” taxon change. One or two identifiers can mostly fix this issue in 15 minutes or less if you identify at the same rate I do. There are cur…

[image] nathantaylor: I’m kind of curious to know what would happen if I committed it. [image] kevinfaccenda: It would only affect the 2 observations where I assume the observer must have opted out of taxon swap updates. Without some input from @loarie I’m not feeling as confident abou…

I think this kind of problem is, in effect, a deliberate feature of how iNaturalist handles taxonomy and identifications. Consider two alternative models for handling taxonomic change. Model A: name 1 → taxonomic change 1 → name 2 name 2 → taxonomic change 2 → name 3 Model B: name 1 → taxonomi…

(More broadly, the model A / chain approach has inherent problems with tolerance stacking—error rates in taxonomic translation are going to stack across the set of taxonomic changes. Not a big deal for a young system that hasn’t accumulated many changes, but a problem that we should expect to become…

I believe the best practice when splitting a name on iNat is to create a taxon split for the (for example) genus. If there’s a geographic split between the two (or more) taxa, the split should be atlased so that observations at the genus level can be sorted into the proper new genera. If atlasing is…

Taxon swap (lumping), recreation of a lumped name under a different taxon ID, and potential problems

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Topic		Replies	Views
Manually prevent certain kinds of taxon changes based on rank types Feature Requests web	14	440	March 26, 2025
Improving iNaturalist's nomenclature & taxonomy General	77	3193	January 11, 2023
Taxon swap removes disagreements General	12	1211	April 11, 2023
Flag identifications that are out of agreement with iNat's taxonomic structure? General	21	2243	February 26, 2020
Opting out of taxonomy changes General	40	1290	October 14, 2022

Taxon swap (lumping), recreation of a lumped name under a different taxon ID, and potential problems

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