I was wondering why the Gymnospermae clade isn’t listed on iNaturalist. I’ve noticed that the site follows a modern taxonomic classification that seems to divide this group into sub-groups like Cycadophyta, Ginkgophyta, Coniferophyta, and Gnetophyta. Is this approach due to the non-monophyly of the Gymnospermae group in current classifications?
Additionally, are there any plans to create clades to group classes that don’t fall under the Angiospermae? This could be useful for those who wish to study or observe non-angiosperm plants in a more structured way.
Thank you for your response and for the incredible work you’re doing with iNaturalist!
iNaturalist does not use monophyly as a taxonomic criterion, for example, flowering plants are still classified as monocots and dicots, and birds are not included in reptiles.
Gymnosperms is paraphyletic, but modern (crown) gymnosperms, aka Acrogymnospermae, is monophyletic. Although, I doubt if this taxon is really useful. Because all four clades of Acrogymnospermae are so different, usually no one would identify an observation as Acrogymnospermae.
iNaturalist names of plants are those governed by the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi and plants (ICN). Under ICN the Gymnospermae is currently treated as a name at the rank of class and is considered synonymous with the class Pinopsida. The name Gymnospermae is present in the iNat system as a synonym. The rankless clade name Gymnospermae is associated with Phylogenetic Nomenclature and has a different meaning (as far as I can tell). Phylogenetic clade names are not implemented within iNat…
According to ICN 16.1, “descriptive names, not so formed, which may be used unchanged at different ranks”. And it explicitly designates Gymnospermae as a descriptive name. So it could be treated as a taxon with any rank above family. And Pinopsida is an automatically typified name, with a suffix “-opsida”. According to Article 16.3, “automatically typified names end as follows: … the name of a class in the plants ends in ‑opsida”, so Pinopsida is definitely a class.
Also, even if you treat Gymnospermae as a class, according to ICN 16.4 note 2, “the principle of priority does not apply above the rank of family”. So you can treat any scientific name as an accepted name, and treat others as synonyms. ICN did not consider Gymnospermae as a synonym of Pinopsida.
“Gymnospermae” is actually an available name on iNaturalist. It is treated as a synonym of Pinopsida, which has the common name of Conifers. Apparently “Gymnospermae” is no longer the accepted name in plant taxonomy but it’s still available here.
I’m currently building a keyword list for Lightroom with a hierarchical structure that corresponds to different taxons for the photos I take. While working on this, I was wondering why the Gymnospermae clade is no longer listed on iNaturalist even though it’s still on Wikipedia. Thank you all for your responses; they really helped clarify things for me. I’m realizing now that taxonomy is way more complicated than I thought!
It isn’t really an issue of monophyly as much as it is technological resources. iNaturalist would move toward monophyletic groups, but the organizational system for taxonomy on their servers creates an overload on memory when committing changes/movements with too many involved IDs. Each individual ID is a unit that must be replaced or moved during a change, and it seems like changes involving > 100,000 IDs are not stable.
For example, the change moving Phalacrocorax auritus to Nannopterum auritum earlier this year involved ~100,000 observations and ran out of memory multiple times, creating errors and incomplete transfers to the new taxon. For comparison, there are over 2,000,000 observations under Pinopsida alone. For birds, there are almost 30,000,000 observations.