There was a recent name change for Xanthium in North America. The plant formerly called Xanthium strumarium in North America is now called X. orientale; X. strumarium was misapplied to North American plants. Just in California, there are now 5,198 observations under X. strumarium and 1,034 under X. orientale. There are 29,000+ in the United States under X. strumarium.
Is the only way to update all of these names to manually add the correct ID or X. orientale?
Thank you and sorry for asking such a basic question.
I really, really wish it was this simple. There have been ongoing discussions on what to do with Xanthium for years. The TLDR is that no one can agree on how many species there are, or what even defines them. Every so often there will be discussion on what to do, but no one has done anything yet, and there isn’t any clear way forward.
Most of the confusion comes from Jepson’s rather unique(?) choice to only recognize one species that is not Xanthium strumarium. This is one step forward, but does not solve any issues with the genus and seems to leave Californians confused at the current state of the genus. Jepson’s solution is regional stopgap and not applicable worldwide.
Curators have access to tools such as taxon swaps, splits, and merges that allow us to move IDs on observations where appropriate automatically. Using maps (atlases) on a taxon split, we can send identifications of an input taxon to different output taxa depending on the geographic location of the observation.
In any case, this is best suited for a curator flag than a forum discussion. If you’re interested, the main discussion is here: https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/600588
Ahh, thanks for the flag link, I was puzzled that there were no flags which is why I posted here–I looked under Xanthium strumarium and X. orientale and did not check the genus for flags. I’ll read that discussion.
Regarding Jepson; POWO also treats X. strumarium as occurring in North America and X. orientale as being in Eurasia, so this is not a position unique to the Jepson eFlora
Yikes, it’s far worse than I thought. Thanks for your response–now I’m more confused and have to wait for more Xanthium work to know what’s going on
Sorry, I should have worded my comment clearer. The unique treatment in Jepson is to only recognize Xanthium orientale from within the Xanthium strumarium complex, excluding all other members of the Xanthium strumarium complex from California, including Xanthium strumarium in the strict sense. I am not aware of any other floras that take this route for the complex.
Since Linnaeus (1753) described in his first edition of “Species Plantarum” two species of Xanthium (i.e., X. strumarium L. and X. spinosum L.), an enormous amount of specific epithets has been given for the genus until our days, to the point that Löve and Dansereau (1959) ironically stated that Xanthium must be one of the most beloved genera in botany (as a simile to a Swedish proverb saying that a beloved child has many names).