Flag for Taxon: Genus Lobivia
| Flagger | Content Author | Content | Reason | Flag Created | Resolved by | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| bouteloua | Genus Lobivia |
synonym in POWO, please discuss before swapping |
Dec. 12, 2019 15:59:12 +0000 | loarie |
see comments |
Comments
Hi Again Cassi, Yes, this is exactly the kind of comment I had hoped to receive. I'll not commit that change then, until it's clear that iNat will follow just POWO as the final say for all plants or if different authorities should be followed for each family.
Ferns and cactuses are the two main big groups I can think of that have a lot of contentious taxonomy on POWO.
POWO currently (Jan 2020) does not include Cactaceae. The current iNat treatment then must be coming from The Catalogue of Life 2018 Annual Checklist which itself use ITIS for Cactaceae. This source, as I commented elsewhere recently, still has issues with incorrect synonymy for this group of plants.
Echinopsis and Lobivia are horticulturally important outside their native regions and have thus sparked a plethora of unnecessary names. Joel Lode's treatment may be the most recent but it is also biased (IMHO) towards smaller genera and a large number of species. Perhaps a more conservative approach would be to adopt the names given under Echinopsis in The New Cactus Lexicon Illustrations (ed. 2013) (http://www.newcactuslexicon.org/index.htm) or (https://www.nhbs.com/the-new-cactus-lexicon-illustrations-book) but listed in the genus of their "Group" as given in that publication. Both of these treatments (Lode and Hunt) refer to the molecular study of Schlumpberger & Renner (2012): "Molecular phylogenetics of Echinopsis (Cactaceae): Polyphyly at all levels and convergent evolution of pollination modes and growth forms." (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22859654) but use the information differently. Personally I will stay with the original NCL treatment until further molecular evidence is available but I understand iNat's reluctance to switch back and forth between these two genera with each new publication.
http://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:30000028-2
iNat has never used Catalogue of Life for taxonomy at rank genus or lower.
My apologies. Mea culpa. I thought I'd searched for Cactaceae on POWO a couple of days ago and been unable to find it. Now looking through my browser history I found it wasn't POWO but WCSP (World Checklist of Selected Plant Families). However, except for the first paragraph - which I now withdraw, I believe my comment is still relevant. I do note though that POWO uses Echinopsis in preference to Lobivia.
(no prob!) I personally try to stay out of curating cactus taxonomy... It might be worthwhile to @ tag some of the top observers / identifiers of these genera to get a few perspectives.
apologies for allowing this conversation to be supplanted by this new flag https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/510242, but I think it would be easier to close this one and move the conversation there since mrtnlowr is making progress on describing the deviation
@birdernaturalist I would be super tentative before making changes to Cactaceae. POWO apparently does not handle that family very well. See larger discussion here: https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/337805
I haven't read through that thread in a long time, but I believe several community members have expressed interest in following Lode, which accepts Lobivia / splits Echinopsis into different genera