Very few fungal names in the iNat taxa tree

General
1

I try to build iNat taxon tree.

I am using the iNaturalist Taxonomy DarwinCore Archive dated January 1, 2023.
I select lichen taxa and get a very low number of taxa: 11 878.
For comparison, the same select from gbif gives 21 137.

For selection, I use tree elements:

class Lecanoromycetes, class Arthoniomycetes, class Lichinomycetes, order Pyrenulales, order Verrucariales, family Abrothallaceae, family Aphanopsidaceae, family Arthopyreniaceae, family Coniocybaceae, family Naetrocymbaceae, family Sphinctrinaceae, family Strigulaceae, family Thelocarpaceae, genus Dictyonema, genus Lichenomphalia, genus Multiclavula

Is the taxonomic tree really exported in its entirety?
The taxa.csv file contains 1,216,980 entries.

2

iNat is not a taxonomic database and doesn’t have all the taxa existing in the science, so answer is of course there’re thousands of species yet to be observed and added to the taxonomy tree of the site.

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3

Thank you! I have tested your idea and see that it is indeed the case. The iNat taxa tree does not contain about half of the observed taxa in the lichen selection. Hope they get added someday.

4

So you can use the data from GBIF in stead of iNaturalist?

5

Personally, I hope all fungal names do not get added to iNat. Only those names required to support observations are essential. The rest represent a significant and unnecessary curatorial overhead to keep them up to date, with no practical benefit within iNat.

At the moment iNat has entres for about 10% of described fungal species (the 10% likely to be seen and identified by iNatters). In terms of published names, rather than taxa, then iNat has around 3% of the names.

For fungi if you want a complete list of names then you should get data from IndexFungorum. That is a nomenclatural database with all names ever published. There are also several taxonomic databases focussing on lichens for various regions.

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6

Yes, I can.

I found that the iNat database posted has fewer valid taxonomic names than the GBIF database and thought I’d report it. Because that could be a mistake.
But I see that this is the idea of the developers/curators.

Since these are either single finds, or they were made in other regions of the world, these names are not critical for my region.

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7

Thanks for your suggestions.

All the things you suggested have already been done. I have collected taxonomic trees for MycoBank, GBIF and some other databases.

As I wrote above, the absence of taxa in the iNat tree is not critical for me. I assumed it might be a bug and reported it.

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