What Sources of Taxonomy Knowledge Do People Really Follow?

Nature Talk
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After reading a bit from this recent forum post here, I saw a lot of people mentioning that the majority of iNat users follow this or that taxonomy. This seemed a bit silly, because how can the majority of people be following the majority of people be following a bunch of different sources? The math just isn’t mathing. Therefore, it got me curious. Where are people actually getting their information for taxonomy? I mean, I know that the iNaturalist guidelines technically have us following a myriad of specific databases, but what do you, dear iNaturalist user, actually use the most in your intrest area?

  • Only the latest and greatest scientific papers
  • Tried and True Field Guides
  • General taxa knowledge from experience
  • Other (explain in comments)
0 voters

I just wanted to open up this discussion, because understanding how the majority of people determine “accurate” taxa can help guide future decisions on how we approach taxon switches and the like. However, because of the controversial nature of this topic, I am going to ask us to please keep this a CIVIL DISCUSSION. This is just a way of finding how we can best serve the community.

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To start out chill, I personally tend to follow scientific papers when I’m really getting into IDing something (ie. Arctium). I know I’m not really an expert in pretty much anything I work in, so I find I trust people who are more studied in what I’m IDing than myself. However, on my own observations, I definitely use field guides a lot more because they are so much faster.

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The easy answer:

I follow the taxonomic hierarchy that iNat uses, using some of each strategy depending on which taxon I am working on. I listen to or read experts, look at guides or scientific papers/keys, and use some general knowledge. iNat observers are largely buffered from taxonomic battles because iNat curators change the hierarchy only when there is widespread agreement.

Details & thoughts:

I haven’t encountered many instances where it mattered which taxonomy I followed. An obvious case where it matters is when a field guide gives an old scientific name for something and iNat uses a different name. Usually, iNat takes care of that for me during name searches when I add my “old” ID to an observation. Rarely, I have to Google the name in the field guide to see what it is now. It’s also possible you might read a paper that used a taxonomic hierarchy that hasn’t been agreed to yet. That one could be trickier to research and if I got lost, I’d ask someone familiar with a higher level taxon for advice.

The community ID can help with these situations, because the experts and taxon curators can tell you why what your field guide said is one species is really another. Maybe it’s naive of me, but if a person who’s researching a specific beetle tells me (and explains why) my X is really a Y or maybe the XY Complex because you can’t really tell them apart from photos, I tend to follow their lead. I have not yet encountered dueling experts telling me different things.

A specific example where I have encountered a name change involved tropical fish that I observed while scuba diving. There were similar looking fish in pan-tropical oceans that were historically considered the same species. But then, a group of scientists convinced most other scientists that the species called X in the Indian Ocean is a different species than one called X in the Pacific Ocean. Now they are X in one ocean and X2 in the other. To make this change in iNat, each taxon had to be split and an additional species created. I don’t know the details of how the curator of each affected taxon decided to make the change, but the curator and other experts did the heavy lifting of going through my existing observations to find the ones that needed to change. And my iNat settings allow automatic updates of taxon changes, because I don’t know enough to be fussy. Easy, peasy for me in iNat but, darn, now my dive logs are wrong. In future observations, I will simply check the About info for the taxon I select (like I always do) to make sure the range includes my location. The ID suggestions should be OK because the other ocean’s scientific name won’t be in range.

Things are getting a little harder now with so researchers doing more DNA sequencing of organisms, because that often suggests that things we thought were related based on physical characteristics might not be as closely related genetically. We may learn that some species grouped together because of a specific set of physical characteristic have genetic differences that suggest they arrived at those characteristics through convergent evolution. This could potentially jumble the taxonomy up, but—again— that only hits us when iNat updates its taxa.

The taxonomists can duke that one out. I’ll deal with changes when they find their way into iNat.

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Other: All of the above. Ideally I want to evaluate all available evidence, both old and new, before deciding which evidence is most credible and informative, and which taxonomy reflects the best balance between that evidence and practical application.

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My answer is yes to all :joy:. From a data provider standpoint, if you are contributing data here it is going to be mapped to a backbone. Even the backbone from here to GBIF is not aligned, so it is largely irrelevant for this work. Trust me if I could erase most subspecies designations on my records I would. However in my personal data I have an authoritative checklist I use from “expert sources”, usually given as a standard of the community (vague, I know). When I am gathering data I use that to align all the various sources to as best I can. For a non professional user this is certaintly confusing but Catalogue of Life and checklist bank are great tools to see what sources are out there and how they align with a given names list. They also provide useful information such as completeness and last update. I have a paper detailing my experience with this for some nightmare arthropod groups. On a more positive note, the groups I more actively work on do have fairly straightforward and widely accepted taxonomic sources (i.e. butterflies and reptiles), which helps considerably in “choosing” a taxonomy. Discoverability is a huge problem, especially as taxonomy inevitably is never finished. Just some groups have a better system in place than others.

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All of the above.

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I get it from all over! However, it is mostly the iNat website.

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I like this answer… would have gone with it as well, would I have read it before voting.

I do use my general knowledge about taxonomy in the field I am IDing most. However, I do run into changes regularly and will go with the “latest and greatest” (sounds really negative the way it is phrased and I do not agree to this sentiment… but maybe it is just because I am not a native english speaker and I do not get it right), usually provided by the wsc (world spider catalogue) I am checking all the time and use it to follow up on the scientific literature

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Usually whatever iNat uses lol. I specifically follow Clements for birds and ASM for mammals.

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Since taxonomy is a box we build, a label we apply - I go with what iNat says. The great and good can dyke it out, thank you.

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For my own research, I follow POWO (Plants of the world online) in most cases as they are quick to update to modern literature. I do follow the molecular phylogenetics and generally try to use names which are supported by the latest studies.

I don’t personally have too much of a problem with a species being placed in genus A or genus B, everything is connnected to databases now where most of the time these synonyms can be resolved automatically. I work in a herbarium where we have plenty of plants filed under genera which are no longer supported by molecular evidence, but I’ve given up trying to change these (assuming we are internally consistent) every time I come across them since it’s just too much work and sometimes names back to an old name and then you have to do double the work for no real effect.

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Hey Kat! Good to see you on the forums as well.

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Thanks to everyone who has responded so far! I am starting to realize that my intial boxes may have been somewhat lacking, both in terms of phrasing and options. I guess I should have said more so that this was in reference to where people tend to place trust when determining which taxonomy to follow (As opposed to what people use to identify). Still, I don’t think this was for nothing.

One of the most intresting things I have gleaned from this has been that the majority of people do not rely on just one source. People seem to tend to lean into what is better laid out, and from what @kat_sullivan was saying, it appears that scientists are able to use keys to switch which naming conventions are being used so that they can better fit the species taxa that they are specifically following.

What that says about how we’ll handle things like swaps… who knows, but I do think it’s useful from the point of view that there are a lot more ways to play a fiddle than I was initially intended to incline towards.

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Since I have long been accustomed to identifying in the field, I use what was historically the usual tool for that.

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I generally use Floras and annotated checklists as the backbone of the taxonomy I use but it’s inevitable that there will be disagreements between different workers in one area. When I get to disputed taxa or names I have to get more creative. Sometimes there is a really well done study or monograph that I can mentally annotate onto the existing framework. For example I ignore violets in almost every reference I have and defer to Ballard’s treatment, because I really like it and think that it works better than what comes up in the older floras (and because my state follows that work too!).

What I find most interesting is when I find a taxa being recognized at multiple levels in multiple sources and I dig in and try to decide what I’m seeing. Am I seeing one or two taxa, are they intergrading or staying phenotypically separate, are the keys working, do they look like what I’ve seen elsewhere. That usually ends up with unsatisfactory answers to what is really going on, either realizing that what is really going on is not well understood or somewhat more complicated than what has been purported in the literature or just needs more research. One recent example for me is the Anemone virginica complex, where we have Anemone virginica (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/237996952) Anemone cylindrica (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/237996642) and This other thing that may be referred to as Anemone virginica var alba, Anemone riparia, or an undescribed hybrid (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/237996990). I don’t think that the taxonomic framework we have works well for any of these names and without a deeper look into the species I won’t be satisfied with any name. It means that sometimes I keep my data somewhat messy rather than giving it a leaf taxa that I do not think applies to what I’m seeing, and means that I have some weird opinions based on personal experience.

The fun part is mapping the name that I’m using to iNaturalist and back again. In the end I use iNat and POWO as an index, but I do not think either of them (or Floras that I use) have a perfect taxonomy that can be used for everything I see. That would be pretty arrogant to think that any living thing is perfectly well understood much less all of the plants of a region.

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For my own research, I use Phasmida Species File (PSF), where all taxonomic information, papers and notes regarding Phasmatodea are available. But for my work here as a curator, its a mix of reliable papers and databases (usually the ones listed in the Taxon Framework, but I deviate when needed after reaching a consensus with other curators).

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I try to use whatever is most up to date. That involves keeping an eye on announcements in various newsletters and trying to obtain taxonomic papers. But you can’t keep on top of all the changes in all groups. iNaturalist is very helpful in this respect.

I’m not altogether conscientious about things changing genus. Changes at the species level are more important, especially species new to Britain, species splits, and subspecies being raised to species rank. When species are lumped, I may not adopt the change straightaway because it might be reversed in a few years, e.g. Telmatophilus typhae / schoenherri and the yo-yoing of Plateumaris sericea / discolor between one species and two.

Plant taxonomy is not straightforward in Britain. The New Flora of the British Isles by Stace is what most people use, now in its fourth edition. At around £60 you need to have some commitment to botany but it isn’t outside the spending power of most adults - not much more than a tank of petrol and will last much longer. But there is also a multi-volume Flora of Great Britain and Ireland by Sell & Murrell: five volumes so far and they have only just reached the monocots. They cost £150-200 per volume. And the taxonomy is not identical to Stace.

Ideally when making a biological record, the taxonomic literature you used should be part of the record so that naturalists in the future can judge what you meant by the species name you used. But it is a struggle to persuade data holders to include identification literature as a standard field in their databases.

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Mostly I work with plants. I follow the Oregon Flora Project for plants of the Pacific Northwest (North America) when I can. The OFP people carefully researched taxonomy. Unfortunately, iNaturalist doesn’t always agree with OFP so I have to follow iNaturalist here, sometimes with comments or with flags that sometimes result in changes here.

For California, I use the Jepson Manual and associated website, in general. (I disagree with some of the grass taxonomy, as do most current grass taxonomists.) I really value Stace’s New Flora of the British Isles, which helps with difficult species that are also introduced here in the PNW. (We never would have figured out Juncus planifolius without it.) I consider Flora of North America authoritative with a few exceptions. Unfortunately, one of the exceptions will soon be Lomatium and allies, the group I wrote up (in Apiaceae, the carrot family). Very thorough DNA-based studies coming out in the next few months will seriously re-arrange genera for these plants. (I knew about the problems but there weren’t solutions when I wrote.)

In more general terms, I use W3 Tropicos. Very current and the synonymy tends to be complete. In most cases it links to the original description of the name, which saves a lot of searching if I need that. Limitation: It gives only homotypic synonyms and it doesn’t select a “best” one; you get to choose. POWO turns out to be great; both homotypic and heterotypic synonyms and it selects a “best” name. It will change if a better name is reported to it with evidence.

  • homotypic = based on the same type specimen. The synonyms are name changes, not newly-described taxa. heterotypic = based on different type specimens. Taxa that were described separately, initially thought to be different.

For writing reports I often have to follow USDA PLANTS, because federal botanists and contractors have to use those names (but can include more current ones in addition, of course). It’s not always up to date. The botanists who maintain this website are well aware of more current names, but face limitations. First, internal problems sometimes prevent their making changes they want to make in a timely way. Second, they’re trying to maintain continuity with earlier publications, for people who don’t understand the fluidity of taxonomy. I don’t recommend it for most purposes.

Of course, I will follow recently published research when I know about it and think it well done. However, it takes a while for changes to be evaluated by others so I’m not quick to accept changes except where I know enough to consider them valid.

For groups I don’t know as well, I turn to my shelves of field guides, some of them older, and rely on iNaturalist’s ability to find synonyms if necessary.

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i will not go back into my taxonomy rant here that makes so many people mad and gets my posts muted, but i will pop in to say, the taxonomic regime iNaturalist uses does not appear to match that which most of their users use, and this poll suggests that as well.

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If I’m posting a record on iNat, I use the taxonomy that iNat has in place. If I’m publishing something, I might follow a more current or otherwise different taxonomy than what iNat uses. It’s not a huge deal.

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