Flag for Taxon: Orchard Orbweaver (Leucauge venusta)
| Flagger | Content Author | Content | Reason | Flag Created | Resolved by | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aispinsects | Orchard Orbweaver (Leucauge venusta) |
recent taxonomic revision (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2018.01.002). |
Sep. 27, 2018 01:57:50 +0000 | claggy |
done, see here https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes/40418 |
Comments
A free academic commons file of the thesis is here: https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/downloads/hm50tr77k.
Would this simply be carried out by community effort as well?
Can you clarify what task you refer to in terms of community effort? Is it the updating of observation records or other ?
Updating the observation records. For instance, adding the IDs for every observation of L. venusta well outside the alleged geographic range.
...individually by one or more identifiers that aren't necessarily iNaturalist staff.
I think this is best done (or at least determine if it is possible) to see if it can be done by the iNat team. There are over 3,000 records, with an unclear number needing updating. An area I know better is birds, and when Circus was split into North American and European species, the records were centrally updated.
@tiwane - if the geography can be defined, is this possible to update centrally?
I've been in correspondence with another user (whom I've just notified about this flag) who's working on atlases for this split, which would probably be the most efficient way to deal with it. So I recommend holding off on manually updated records for the moment.
Just a reminder that iNaturalist does not follow primary literature for spiders, we follow http://www.wsc.nmbe.ch/ as noted in https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/curator+guide#policies
Thanks for the directive and letting me know which system iNat uses. I'll refrain from further identifications, then. How will we know what comes of this?
I'll try to provide an update when the atlases are finished.
Also @aispinsects, I apologize if my last comment about our taxonomic authority for spiders came off as curt, I didn't mean it to be that way. Thanks for all your help on iNat.
@aispinsects - just to help out, assuming each of the records that needs to be updated is research grade, you would need to get a minimum of 4 people to enter the corrected identifications in order to get the newly corrected ID to 'take over', which will take significant work, if it can be centralized, that's far more efficient.
Pointing out the issue here was a great first step.
It was not curt at all! I mean just postpone the identification of some L. venusta as the other species, where needed. I should have flagged before making a few identifications anyways. I'm looking forward to the updates.
Hi all! I contacted iNat about this split to see how to go about this change. @loarie suggested I create a new inactive L. venusta taxon, an active taxon for L. argyrobapta, and make an atlas for each of those pages to link to them for review before the change. Good timing for this discussion to come up, as I just finished those.
Here are links to the taxon and atlases:
L. argyrobapta: https://www.inaturalist.org/atlases/17145
L. venusta: https://www.inaturalist.org/atlases/17144
This was my first time doing something like this, so I would certainly appreciate additional review on those. I added comments under the atlases with my sources and additional thoughts/explanations.
I'm assuming the checklist places from the currently active L. venusta page do not carry over to the inactive one, so that would explain why this atlas didn't auto-populate with those.
If I understand correctly, the southeastern states that are included in both atlases will be automatically changed to genus IDs when the taxon split is made. That isn't great, since L. argyrobapta's range only includes the coastal areas of those states, but it's certainly better than having to manually add disagreeing IDs to everything ID'd with L. venusta in Florida and countries to the south of the US. I suppose we could attempt to narrow the L. argyrobapta atlas down to the county level in those states, but the only graphics we have to go by are the ones from Ballesteros & Hormiga 2018, such as this one, so I'm not sure how accurate it would be.
The removal of synonym status and addition of the argyrobapta record was already added. The whole article seems behind a paywall so I can't tell if there are other changes suggested. If so, can you please share.
A couple of other notes. I don't think there is a way to automatically move observations into the revised genera based on geography. Curators can't do it with the tools we have. It would require specialized action by the core iNat team.
Secondly, iNat as practice does not attempt to follow primary literature to manage taxonomy. It is not a viable option either in terms of scope or to resolve discrepencies. Spiders however are one area where a defined reference is used, which in this case is the World Spider Catalog.