Gymnosperms ready for global taxonomic consensus?

Hi folks,

For some groups like Odes and Amphibians, global taxonomic references are mature enough that iNat has pretty well curated and globally complete taxonomies facilitated by conversations like these:
https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/loarie/11694-world-odonata-list
https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/loarie/11101-internal-reference-taxonomies-amphibian-pilot

Unfortunately, for Plants and most other Insect orders (which are the 2 most 'observose' groups on iNat) global taxonomy simply isn't there yet. As a result, taxonomy on iNat for these groups is a bit looser with curators often adding species opportunistically, but as a result more synonymy and confusion across regions.

the 12 (or 13 depending on your taxonomic preference) families Gymnosperms represent a subset of plants that are probably mature enough for iNat to take a more rigorous global approach.

But to explore this further, we need to better understand where iNat is now in comparison to the various global references out there. To that end, I started this spreadsheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10e3QgCam8rikt_y17Wh3XvY2-auTFIyqwq_2tbME1oo/edit?usp=sharing
I added and filled out columns matching iNat to key (WCSP) and I added a blank column for conifersdotorg (conifersdotorg_name) that @nutcracker is going to help fill in. If folks want to consider other sources (e.g. the GBIF backbone) can you add columns and fill them in? This will allows us to fill in the surface specific discrepancies in the sources so we can contrast the sources with specific examples (extant species only please - e.g. no hybrids, extinct taxa, or ssp/var)

Just to give a sense for where we'd be going with this Gymnosperm exercise, I fully coded the family Araucariaceae for both WCSP and GD. So were we to adopt a global reference for that genus (rather than the regional stitching approach), whether we went with WCSP or GD we'd probably want to:

  1. merge Agathis robusta (sensu stricto) & Agathis spathulata into Agathis robusta (sensu lato)
  2. merge Agathis dammara (sensu stricto) & Agathis philippinensis into Agathis dammara (sensu lato)

However, the following 3 changes would bring iNat in line with WCSP but out of line with GD. So whether we were to make them or not would depend on which reference we would be using.

  1. swapping Agathis labillardieri into Agathis labillardierei
  2. merging Agathis borneensis (sensu stricto) & Agathis endertii into Agathis borneensis (sensu lato)
  3. merging Agathis moorei (sensu stricto) & Agathis corbassonii into Agathis moorei (sensu lato)

Similarly, the following 1 change would bring iNat in line with GD but out of line with WCSP.

  1. splitting Araucaria muelleri (sensu lato) into Araucaria goroensis & Araucaria muelleri (sensu stricto)

Thanks!

Posted on October 7, 2017 04:33 PM by loarie loarie

Comments

Hi,

Noticed that some of the species marked as "kew only" are present on iNaturalist, but at subspecific level. Here is a couple examples:

Juniperus turbinata (Kew) as Juniperus phoenicea turbinata (iNat)
Juniperus navicularis (Kew) as Juniperus oxycedrus transtagana (iNat)

This implies that neither J. phoenicea nor J. oxycedrus will be matches to their Kew concepts, and a split will have to be done in addition to the swaps for these cases. I tried to mark it on the google doc, but I'm too affraid to mess with your organisation scheme.

Posted by duarte over 6 years ago

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