Velvet/White-winged Scoter split

Bug Reports
1

My scoter observation in Ohio was set to Velvet while others seem to have gone correctly to White-winged.

2

There is only a single person who can make the taxonomic update, it has been pending in draft mode for 17 months now, and probably a dozen requests to implement it have gone unresolved.

Sorry, I cant link to the flag/discussion as I am locked out of the site due to the ongoing google authentication issues.

Some users are trying to push id updates by hand, but it is a huge task to do one at a time.

3

https://inaturalist.ca/flags/267057

4

Why don’t we let the automated taxa split play out. (I think @cmcheatle has made this point too). Aren’t identifiers who are going through and re-labeling already identified observations being a bit impatient? Arguably it’s a waste of time right? Maybe I’m missing something.

My guess is that some identifiers don’t realize that taxa splits can be done automatically.

5

The problem with this one (and several others) is:

  • it has been pending since summer 2018 with many requests to fix it
  • the new taxa was turned on, which is not supposed to happen until the change is activated, meaning some data is going under 1 name, some under another name, and no one can even go in and for the time being deactivate the new taxa so at least the data goes in 1 place.
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6

So @cmcheatle is getting range maps from IUCN the current bottleneck?

I know this has been discussed extensively already. I’m just curious and trying to learn more how this process works.

7

I’m not sure, I get the sense there is just a massive mix of issues

  • IUCN appears to not be responding to queries from the general public to access and download range maps, at least that is the experience being encountered by myself and another curator who have tried
  • it is not clear how well atlasing this will work here as atlases dont work on oceans, and many of these observations will be on the coasts, and may thus not get captured by an atlas definition (if the bounday of say Newfoundland stops at the land, anything reported on the water is in no-mans land per atlases)
  • there are only 2 curators for birds, one is the CEO of the site, the other appears to have stopped using the site as of several months ago, so there are still taxon changes from 2018 not processed to say nothing of the 2019 changes.

I dont really think the iucn range map is an absolute need though since the ranges of the 2 are pretty clearly split and defined and could be manually done.

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8

Yeah that’s what I was thinking. Compared to some other species seems pretty easy to draw some polygons separating these.

I didn’t realize there were only two curators for birds! Seems nuts given how many great birders and ornithologists use the site.

9

Range maps are not even a technical requirement to do the split, it is the atlases that need to be done to automate moving geographically appropriate records.

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10

sorry for the delay on this - this is committed https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes/45717. I’ve been hard at work on some new curation tools/guidelines in the context of the Clements v19 update that will try to make curating a bit more manageable - more soon.

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