Flag for Taxon: pondcypress (Taxodium ascendens)
| Flagger | Content Author | Content | Reason | Flag Created | Resolved by | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| erwin_pteridophilos | loarie | pondcypress (Taxodium ascendens) |
active synonymous taxon present, decision needed |
Sep. 17, 2017 15:31:54 +0000 | loarie |
see comments |
Comments
Thanks a lot for your excellent insights into the matter, Master Nutcracker!
Since there is no publication at subspecific rank, we are left with treatment as distinct species, or variety of T. distichum, otherwise we created an invalid name. Apparently Nuttal's "imbricarium" is indeed older than "ascendens", explaining that T. distichum var. ascendens may not be preferred.
On the other hand this suggests that "T. imbricarium" resp. "T. imbricatum" shall be the right specific name since priority, but this binomen has apparently not been published.
My earlier information was, that "imbricarium" had been the later name. At time it seems the relation between preference of T. ascendens and var. imbricarium is close to 1 : 1.
C.J. Earle in conifers.org decided for varietal treatment, WCSPF (as source of the most unreliable Plant List) accepted as well the variety. Thus we could follow their decision to keep the variety, despite separation of distinct types suggested (at least) ranking as subspecies.
Yes, the decision to ban subspecific treatment in favour to use solely the term variety, got nothing to do with scientific accuracy.
In former times any different appearance was easily named as variety, from individual cultivars up to distinct species, usage of subspecies got the benefit of more accuracy, as i do think.
Publication of Taxodium imbricarium which got priority to T. ascendens.
Yep, taxonomy is more about tricky detective and juristic work, than about naturalistic science, thanks for explaining!
Don't know if i had just forgotten that priority is bound to rank.
This may be reasonable in case Brongiart did not know about Nuttal's "var. imbricaria", or thought it to be a different tree. The prior variety is not mentioned at publication of T. ascendens.
We could follow WCSPF to keep the taxon at variety rank, on the other hand several other institutions do prefer specific separation, saying both treatments will persist, and it doesn't matter not to agree with The Plant List in this case.
My decision is to accept the preferred usage of iNat. observations, as currently 79 × T. ascendens : 3 × T. distichum var. imbricatum. This causes the least number of changed identifications, and is in agreement with preferred use.
Is this ok with you @kueda and @loarie ?
so are we going with POWO (Taxodium ascendens -> Taxodium distichum imbricarium) or deviating (Taxodium distichum imbricarium -> Taxodium ascendens)?
to get rid of the duplication, I curated things so that we're deviating from POWO for now since fewer obs were involved to go that way (see https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_framework_relationships/224448), but lets continue the conversation here about whether we want to do so or not
I would use the POWO name (and will start doing so). Nuttall called it "Cupressus disticha var. imbricaria" (not imbricata, although it's probably a typo: https://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/5282731 ) so the epithet must be a grammatical form of "imbricaria" which leaves us with "Taxodium distichum var. imbricarium." Raising it to species rank is plainly contradicted by varied morphological studies more recently supported by molecular studies (see discussion at https://www.conifers.org/cu/Taxodium.php ), and no major author working in the Pinales has regarded it as a distinct species since, well, a long time ago - before the 1970's at least. Long enough for it to be quaint.
Should we resolve https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_framework_relationships/224448 by getting in line with POWO?
If so would this involve swapping Taxodium distichum imbricarium intoTaxodium ascendens?
What about Taxodium mucronatum (also not in POWO)?
POWO is scientifically accurate in reducing Taxodium mucronatum to a variety, Taxodium distichum var. mexicanum, but I would not recommend making that change. Nobody will like it, especially nobody in Mexico where it is the national tree. Taxodium ascendens is in sort of the same boat. People in the Deep South like to think of it as "their tree". I spent some time today surfing the Web for pondcypress accounts and all the fans of this tree like to call it a distinct species. Yet, in this case, the taxonomic authorities (IUCN, ITIS, TROPICOS, Kew, Farjon, Eckenwalder) have all lined up behind calling it var. imbricarium (or imbricatum), so that's an excellent reason to conform to the scientific norm on this one. It's really a social question more than a scientific one, though. At the moment you have 301 observations by 79 identifiers. I wonder what they want?
I'm really confused at how this flag was resolved with the result going with the name Taxodium ascendens. It seemed like some really good comments supporting the use of Taxodium var. imbricarium were made, with only one descent, and even that descent sounded a bit reluctant to me. Did I miss something?
http://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/413297-Taxodium-distichum-imbricatum with just 3 currently added observations, T. ascendens with 79. We needed decision concerning preference at iNat database, to avoid duplicate listing. In case we kept the varietal status of Pondcypress, we needed to decide preference of " var.imbricatum" or "var. imbricarium" as orthographic variants. @nutcracker