I’ve been surprised at how often I see disagreement in different authorities and online resources when it comes to plant taxonomy. The big references I use when it comes to plants are BONAP, USDA material (including the USDA PLANTS database, Silvics manual, FEIS, Plant Fact sheets, and other materi…

[image] cazort: BONAP, USDA material, …ITIS In my experience these sources tend to lag well behind POWO in reflecting even broadly accepted taxonomic changes. In some cases, this kind of passive “conservatism” in name changes may be seen as a good thing, because in some cases POWO does jump …

Can’t speak to plant taxonomy other than that it is undoubtedly more complex than for vertebrate animals which I mainly focus on. Seems there are a lot of active synonyms and a number of parallel taxonomies with plants. Plus a whole lot more species. For iNat purposes I obviously use the taxonomy …

Systematics is science. Taxonomy is the cataloging and naming method by which systematists organize organisms into neat boxes (taxa). There can be disagreements in either but taxonomy does have a little more personal preference imbedded in its decision-making. I stopped worrying about taxonomic disa…

In preparing reports on sites and ecologies within the state of New York for work I tend to use the taxonomy of the most recent Checklist of the Vascular Flora of New York (reflected online by the New York Flora Atlas. It doesn’t agree 100% with any one of the authorities listed above, but taxonomy …

I follow Weakley’s Flora of the Southeastern United States (for the most part) in my professional life (my herbarium specimens, surveys in the field, etc). My iNaturalist identifications are a compromise between POWO and Weakley. With groups like Dichanthelium I recognize that there’s more going o…

I didn’t know Ballard published a new treatment of Viola - where is it? His website it great, but definitely reflects a project in progress.

Some of my best friends are plant taxonomists :roll_eyes: :sweat_smile:, but although I love them dearly, following them (and others) is a REAL headache! On a personal side, it makes it difficult to keep my well-stocked archives up-to-date, but I suppose in the general order of things that’s just a …

The World Checklist of Vascular Plants ( https://wcvp.science.kew.org/ ) is the most actively curated worldwide taxonomic backbone for plants afaik. It acts as POWO’s taxonomic index. Much of it is expert-reviewed and subsets of it are published in Catalogue of Life and serve as the basis for much of …

Is it really surprising that science often hasn’t just one agreed point of view? I think that many bad choices in recent times have been done just in the name of a presumed “only one science’s point of view”. Apart this, [image] cazort: How do you decide what taxonomic scheme to use for dispu…

When Different Taxonomic Authorities Disagree (Especially About Plants)

Nature Talk

spins January 28, 2022, 10:35pm 4

I use the one that makes most sense. Some taxonomers really don’t have a clue (it’s not a real science (yet)).

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Plant Taxonomy - Are We Really Following POWO? Should we? Curators	64	2687	September 25, 2024
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When Different Taxonomic Authorities Disagree (Especially About Plants)

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