At the very least we need subgenera to be added. Even just having Salix subgenus Salix and S. subg. vetrix could help to clean up a lot of northeastern observations. Subgenera present in North American can be found in FNA: http://beta.floranorthamerica.org/Salix

This reference I had when this flag was made is also just for North America. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0121965
It cites a source for Russia and Asia (in Russian). Not sure how many species that would leave out.

Willows of Russia and surrounding countries: http://www.herba.msu.ru/shipunov/school/books/skvortsov1999_willows_of_russia.pdf / http://172.104.19.75/announcements/Skvortsov1999.html

A systematic enumeration of Japanese Salix https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289391293_A_systematic_enumeration_of_Japanese_Salix_Salicaceae

Flora of China: Salicaceae: http://flora.huh.harvard.edu/china/mss/volume04/SALICACEAE.published.pdf

Here's a paper for Europe but I can't find a full text and I'm not sure if it actually lists species and their taxonomy https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/proceedings-of-the-royal-society-of-edinburgh-section-b-biological-sciences/article/abs/salix-taxonomy-in-europe-problems-interpretations-observations/51AA01277495BE5F54351EBFB930BD6E
Also https://bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12862-015-0311-7

yeah actually, because then there's the potential that staff (Scott) could batch edit them to assign them to their respective parents

That can be a slog, but IPNI is a good start. It often will explicitly list the parents, or it should list the publication in which it was named, which should list the parents.

Do we need to get all the information for species not yet in iNat as well?

Yes because that helps inform whether we can even do subgenera/sections on iNat. As well, Scott can mass import the missing POWO species so that everything is lining up better.

Hi, I've tried to assign willows to their respective infrageneric ranks many years ago on Biolib.cz webpage. So maybe it will help: https://www.biolib.cz/en/taxon/id38917/. It may be little bit outdated in places and there are unfortunately no links to literature sources but it may serve as a basis for sorting.

Going down through the list alphabetically, most of the species I've skipped were because they weren't in the main papers I'm referencing or were labeled as synonyms in those papers. Sometimes they're hybrids or spelling differences.
There have been a couple that aren't mentioned in those papers because they were described after those were published. What if they weren't assigned a subgenus in their description?

@michal_hrones it looks like you were able to find subgenera for all the Chinese sections except Fulvopubescentes? Do you happen to remember how to found them or have sources for that?

Okay we've gone through all the species (not all the hybrids yet). There are about 90 left without subgeneric taxonomy because either they need curation (hybrids and/or synonyms), I don't have access to the literature that discusses them, or they were more recently described without taxonomy.

Do we need to get all of them? It won't be possible for the latter group. (Edit I see Quercus and Carex don't have all of them covered)

Thanks, I tried to use academic papers as much as possible so my sources give similar results.

Also I've basically done as much as I can with regards to the spreadsheet now. I'm not sure exactly what the formatting needs to be?

It's a balance to weigh - are there any IDs? (need to check inaturalist.org/identifications?taxon_id= as they don't always appear on the taxon page) does any of that data (place check lists, common names, range map, atlas, etc) exist on the input taxon? does the output already have the input listed as a synonym? should that data be transferred to the output taxon? I got the idea of inactivating without swapping from Scott, so if you're getting pushback it is probably worth a forum post or email.

I don't think the flags need to be dealt with before adding sections, but it would be nice to resolve them as part of this process.

I would try to make it as clean as possible and resolve as many flags as I could before handing anything to staff - looks like there are 54 taxa that are on iNat but not in POWO, for example. I moved a few that have been resolved to a tab called archive.

Instead of having blanks in any of the columns for subg, section, or subsection, I would put some sort of note like "not applicable", "spans two sections", or "unknown". To distinguish whether it was researched and you could not find the answer or it really isn't applicable because it is a hybrid that spans two sections.

Consider whether we actually want subsections - do we know how complete they are compared to the sections? In the sense of https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/curator+guide#nodes for example the section Glaucae only has one subsection listed (Glaucae). There are 3 species in that section assigned and 10 species unassigned to a subsection.

Add a column for the direct parent taxon_id (e.g. to distinguish Salix at rank=section from Salix at rank=subgenus or genus)

I've inactivated/swapped the simpler issues and moved them to the archived tab. The rest I'm not confident in how to deal with them.

Several examples like this where the taxon is a synonym of several other taxa https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/496046
Some examples like this where the output taxon isn't in iNat yet. Why do you have the output taxon inactive here? https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/518476
And where there were swaps/merges that affected species with a decent number of observations I made the taxon change but didn't commit it.

If the description of a species says what the closest related species is, but not what section it's it, can it be assumed to be in the same section as the related species?

The best set-up might have some format I'm not aware of, so might be best to talk to @loarie now -

Scott, there's a Google Doc of 500+ willow species with the subgenus and sections assigned. Currently willows are all hanging off the genus on iNat, but the community feels it will be helpful to have infrageneric taxa, and it's also moderately complete (not a ton of unknowns at the subgenus level, and some research still to be done). It's still a work in progress but we'd like to make sure it's formatted correctly to see if they can be assigned to new parent taxa in one go.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZyIyso9OonTZRhhne1cdZNWjUCRZP3IUX42J5EvuXAo/edit#gid=2030241887

1 - Some are not assigned a subgenus/section, either because it's unknown or because it spans two subgenera, as a hybrid. They're currently listed in Column B as "unknown" or "2 subgenera" depending on the situation. (Edit: ignore subsections, see below. I think we can ignore subsection right now since there might be too many unknowns there. Up to @upupa-epops.)

2 - do you need the parent taxon_id in a new column or is this current set-up sufficient?

3 - Column G calls out species that are in POWO but not yet in iNat. Is it possible for you to add and assign these in one go as well? There are a ton of additional hybrids listed in POWO that I don't think we need to add to iNat right now.

After we do this we can lock Salix to better manage the taxonomy of incoming taxa.
thanks!

I would agree. I don't really see a need to have subsections, as most of them contain so few species.

Folks should be able to do this through the interface. If you want me to help, I just need a table of
taxon_name, parent_name
e.g. Salix kikodsei, Vetrix

@loarie does the spreadsheet linked above qualify for that or does it need some reformatting?

I'm not familiar at the moment with all the other changes, except the Salix species issues at the end look the same as what we determined in the spreadsheet (i.e. when a species wasn't in POWO we noted what species/hybrid POWO has it as).

is it possible to make a clean spreadsheet (or paste something in here) where its
taxon_name, taxon_rank, parent_name, parent_rank
e.g.
Salix kikodsei, species, Vetrix, subgenus
Vetrix, subgenus Arbuscella, section
...
for every taxon that you want moved (and the idea being if the parent doesn't exist it will be created)?

Okay made that table. For inter-section hybrids and incertae sedis species should I just make the cells blank? (you should be able to edit the sheet as well if that makes anything easier)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZyIyso9OonTZRhhne1cdZNWjUCRZP3IUX42J5EvuXAo/edit

hybrid please

@loarie is anything else needed?

@loarie ohh I see, just the direct parent. Makes sense! I'll do that now.
The rows without a parent will have the genus as the parent.

OK I added/moved everything in the table and created a big deviation for the subgenera/section
there's still 277 "relationship unknowns" in the family
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/47567/taxonomy_details
it would be great to either swap these away or document whats going on with deviations
thanks all

There are a ton of Salix subspecies, varieties, and forms that I don't know what to do with; I've never worked with taxon relationships before. Also a handful of unplaced species names.