Flag for Taxon: fireweed (Chamaenerion angustifolium)
| Flagger | Content Author | Content | Reason | Flag Created | Resolved by | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| bouteloua | fireweed (Chamaenerion angustifolium) |
treated as Epilobium angustifolium in POWO, please discuss before swapping |
Sep. 1, 2018 15:31:53 +0000 | bouteloua |
entered taxon framework relationship deviation |
Comments
@bouteloua : I came on here to raise an identical flag to yours from a year ago. I admittedly have much less comprehension than you of the back end of iNat's taxonomy. My limited understanding is that iNat follows POWO for plants. What issues need discussing before such swaps are made? I will raise fewer unhelpful flags in future if I'm able to grasp the nuances here. Thanks in advance.
"What issues need discussing before such swaps are made?"
This isn't really defined anywhere, but if we can get rough consensus that the taxon swap should be made, we can go ahead. The main issue is that POWO is quite out-of-date for certain groups of plants and for others they're pretty up-to-date. Knowing which is the case is basically impossible, so I went ahead and preemptively flagged a bunch of taxa that have a lot of observations to help prevent potentially disruptive taxon changes--i.e. commit the taxon change and then have to reverse it because it turns out POWO was out-of-date, which makes a big mess of IDs on each observation.
So basically, is it now commonly accepted that this taxon is considered part of Epilobium? Consensus was to include it as part of Chamaenerion following this discussion in 2017: https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/127414
I'd suspect that this is one of the cases where POWO is outdated. Given the overall agreement in the discussion linked above, I suggest to stick with Chamaenerion for the time being.
Thanks for the explanation, @bouteloua . Makes sense. RE this particular taxon, I didn't have a strong preexisting opinion before sifting through that discussion to which you linked. As @jakob states, seems to be decent agreement at the moment around the name currently used by iNat. My firsthand experience with this taxon and it's name comes primarily from it's occurrence in Britain and Ireland, and my use of a local field guide (Collins Guide) to ID it. That guide uses Chamerion angustifolium (L.) Holub, and it is the conflict between this and iNat's use of Chamaenerion angustifolium (L.) Scop. that caused me to look up POWO's stance. But agreed, it's impossible to assess how up to date a POWO treatment of any given taxon is. Would be nice if they'd add "as of //__" and "sensu [primary lit.]" clauses to each entry as they update them. Certainly a massive task retrospectively, but wouldn't be much additional effort if done as updates are made. Anyway, out of iNat's control. Seems sensible to me, as well, to leave the taxon name as is for now.
I closed these related flags https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/273554 https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/273553
and created a deviation for now:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/564922/taxonomy_details
this looks like our most 'observose' deviation - so not opposed to getting in line with POWO if we're all in agreement but would love to not go back and forth on this one given all the observations it touches
If anyone is still wondering about this, this is a useful article to consult:
Sennikov, A.N., 2011. Chamerion or Chamaenerion (Onagraceae)? The old story in new words. Taxon, 60(5), pp.1485-1488.
It's also listed as Epilobium angustifolium in the Plant List