Flag for Taxon: Kilimanjaro Guereza (Subspecies Colobus guereza caudatus)
| Flagger | Content Author | Content | Reason | Flag Created | Resolved by | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| dejong | Kilimanjaro Guereza (Subspecies Colobus guereza caudatus) |
we like to suggest a taxonomic change. Butynski & De Jong (2018) agued to raise this taxon to the species level. This is accepted by IUCN 2020. |
Apr. 26, 2020 04:29:50 +0000 | loarie |
see comments |
Comments
Sounds good, thank you for your prompt response!
Looks good to me. I support this taxon change.
I swapped C. g. caudatus into C. caudatus, edited the parent on the other 7 subspecies, and then split C. guereza by atlas (https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes/75636, https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes/75637). It mostly worked, but now observations that only have subspecies level IDs aren't RG, e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/42858868. Checking and unchecking a DQA doesn't fix it, but adding another agreeing subspecies ID does. And maybe related, I did a search for observations that had IDs of the old guereza taxon (43527) and it came up with some from people opting out of taxonomic updates to their IDs, but also this one: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/3571836, which has no ID of 43527. It has 3 subspecies IDs, no species IDs, and the 3 don't all agree. It should be RG at species right now, but it's showing needs ID at the first subspecies ID that was added. Notably, all these wonky observations say "The Community ID requires at least 2 identifications" even though they have more than 2 IDs.
Any thoughts? Should I have swapped all those subspecies instead of editing the parents?
I provided a species-lvl ID to the observation you highlight to see what would happen, and it for some reason re-established its RG status.
I was taught that during my internship that it is much better to reposition subspecies when making taxon changes on iNaturalist before revising the parents. Even though the parents were edited instead, I think in the future it’s probably better to swap subspecies instead. I’m not sure what specifically happened internally (code wise) because it doesn’t at face value seem like something should have gone wrong, but maybe @loarie could provide insight.
@jwidness I'm trying to figure out the issue here https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/42858868 (apologies I fixed it while investigating) - but it doesn't look like any of those IDs were added by a taxon change. how does that issue relate to the taxon changes you mentioned?
All (or nearly all) of these used to be RG: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?taxon_id=1075514&hrank=subspecies
I de-activated the subspecies, moved them to a new parent, and re-activated them, and now somehow all those observations are Needs ID. I guess something about de-activating them went wrong?
@loarie This was never fixed -- observations with only subspecies IDs were left as Needs ID, e.g.:
However, someone went through and added new IDs to almost all of the observations, which moved them back to RG. Only three remain if you want to try to investigate:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/33579028
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/8803155
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/13825330
I eventually figured out how to reproduce the bug and reported in on the forum: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/obs-with-only-subspecies-ids-can-get-stuck-without-a-cid/15992
I'm closing this sense we're currently deviating from Mammal Diversity Database to align with IUCN in treating Colobus caudatus as separate from Colobus guereza. The deviation is here
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_framework_relationships/424065
and links back to this flag
The iNat mammal taxonomy is currently tied to the Mammal Diversity Database, but since that has been static for a while now, we've been willing to do some deviations, particularly for species accepted by IUCN. This seems like it would be a relatively simple change -- caudatus is isolated and there's no real potential for identification mix-ups.
I can use the IUCN map and take the blob over Kilimanjaro as the map for caudatus (and use the rest for C. guereza).
Does that sound good?
(Side note: taxon changes are locked until May 5th, but I don't think this is urgent.)
@bobby23 @loarie
For reference, a link to the caudatus publication: http://www.wildsolutions.nl/geographic-range-taxonomy-conservation-mount-kilimanjaro-guereza-colobus-monkey-primates-cercopithecidae-colobus/