The sedge genus Carex has had a number of high level taxon swaps recently, changing the various groupings below genus. With the swaps, I have noticed that many former disagreeing higher level IDs (orange option) have been replaced with different higher level non-disagreeing (green option) taxons. T…

Unfortunately, this is the current reality of taxon swaps, and the highly volatile concepts of infrageneric classification (which are constantly changing, especially for groups like Carex). The “options,” as you call them, weren’t changed, but a new, non-disagreeing ID was generated automatically. T…

This sort of thing is a major problem with taxon swaps and changes in iNat. There really needs to be a better way of dealing with them as these changes often wind up wiping out thousands of IDs, often ones that never get properly re-identified back to species again. An example of this is while bac…

See also https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/disagreeing-higher-ids-changed-to-agreeing-due-to-taxon-swap/39096 And other threads with similar opposite problems.

I honestly don’t perceive this as a problem. I much prefer to see disagreements nullified in this way than artificially created by a split. As in, one user identifies to genus, then another identifies to species in that genus. They agree at genus level and it moves closer to RG. Then that species is…

[image] jasonhernandez74: If a disgreement disappears because of taxonomic change, that’s a change I can get on board with. The problem is that this is what’s happening. See the link to my post in the comment above: the CV generated a lot of incorrect species level IDs, I put in disagreeing h…

yeah, it needs to stop. taxon changes need to stop, full stop. Every 10 years you can do a big update with all the changes of the last decade, doing it piecemeal is breaking inaturalist. The current system has the whole site all but unusable to anyone except hardcore taxonomists. But since curators …

I wouldn’t stop them, but I would very much like to see a lot more structure and regularity in how they’re addressed and applied. Applying them en-mass periodically rather than whenever someone gets new information would probably be a good idea (kind of like how the CV is updated periodically rathe…

[image] earthknight: how the CV is updated periodically rather than just slowly upgrading in the background Then we could have a blog post. With a list. And could see where we are.

well i wouldn’t stop them either, just a decade seems like a small ask in response to how messed up taxonomy has gotten, it’ll take at least that long to try to fix it :D but, taxonomists rule iNat and botany in general and in my experience the ones making the decisions aren’t interested in the nee…

Taxon swap removes disagreements

General

trscavo April 3, 2023, 1:01pm 4

Yes, I agree. The problem can occur as a result of the simplest taxon change, such as a name change. There’s a workaround that can be used to restore the disagreeing IDs after the fact.

Topic		Replies	Views
Observations stuck at genus level after taxon swap General	5	393	September 1, 2023
Taxon swaps without splitting higher level taxa General	6	557	November 20, 2021
Loss of hard disagreement following taxon swaps General	4	307	February 28, 2026
Taxon swap creates disagreement Bug Reports	7	532	November 21, 2019
ID Disagreements Post-Taxon Swap General	1	406	June 29, 2021

Taxon swap removes disagreements

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