Hello everyone, I noticed that some taxonomical levels were missing from taxa page in inaturalist, for example notice how Rosids are not included in inaturalist, also otice how (Eu)Dicots is a clade in wikipedia and a class in wikipedia.
The discrepency is even more extreme when it comes to birds. in this case 8 clades are completely missing from inaturalist! particularly Dinosauria, which is how I discovered this difference because I was excited to learn that birds are actually dinosaurs but dissapointed to find that not mentioned on inaturalist.
I believe that iNaturalist consistently recognizes all the “standard” taxonomic levels but not the less formal ones such as the clades you mention. It’s just a matter of keeping the organization as simple as possible. Where there has been a demand for an informal taxonomic level (usually levels within a family) it has been inserted but I think the process is not simple so they don’t do it unless there’s a demand. There hasn’t been much demand for “Rosids,” for example.
iNaturalist’s taxonomy of higher nodes mostly crystallized by 2013, following the broadly accepted formal higher taxonomies of the time. Each time a change is made, iNaturalist recalculates the agreements/disagreements on every affected observation. The plethora of observations and taxa made under these nodes since this point now weighs on them each time a change is made, essentially cementing them in place, for better or worse. There are simply too many objects attached in too many places for their current hardware to be able to handle changes to these higher nodes.
For reference, iNaturalist’s ability to handle changes begins to break down between 100,000-150,000 observations affected by that change. There are currently 137,800,000 observations of plants and 46,000,000 observations of birds.
I guess the crux of the issue is that I wasn’t aware that somewhat informal, in fact I thought they were as formal as you can get with classification due to watching this video about the topic.
A missing clade that bugs (or beetles) me is Holometabola. Without it, if I see a larva identified as insect, I have to put it in an order to annotate it as a larva. I might not could tell a caterpillar from a sawfly schadon, a maggot from a wasp schadon, or a grub from some caterpillars. (The witchetty grub is a caterpillar, not a grub.)
There are many fossil/no longer extant clades that are not included in iNat’s taxonomy as iNat is for recent/current observations of living organisms.
Generally the iNat staff prefer to reduce the number of rank levels involved in any particular taxon to improve website performance. This makes sense but also results in a fair amount of inconsistency and lack of helpful taxa ranks in various places.
