Flag for Taxon: bloody brittlegill (Russula sanguinea)
| Flagger | Content Author | Content | Reason | Flag Created | Resolved by | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| fungee | bloody brittlegill (Russula sanguinea) |
it is not in eastern N. A. yet there are more than a third of the observations from that location. |
Feb. 18, 2021 15:30:23 +0000 | cooperj |
resolved |
Comments
I was flagging them to be included in this document. The only resolution I'm looking for is to have the numbers of observations become a lot less. I understand things get complicated quickly when talking about all of North America, let alone the world, and there is still a ton of work to do in most taxa. Since the east coast is so active the identifiers are already facing an uphill battle, I figure we need this sort of help. If we could train the AI away from these taxa, maybe by next Winter there wouldn't be such a mess in the backlog. I think I really got most of the problem species with over 100 misidentifications (in the East of N. A. mostly) as was suggested to do on the forum. I read it kind of quickly, I suppose I could journal them and link the journal entry if you'd rather keep it out of the flags.
Yes - strongly agree we need to get these things off the CV training list so bad idents aren't self-propagating. At least in NZ it would cut down our problem a bit. Most of our real species don't get onto the CV list because they are endemic and few people identifying them. We aren't a big enough country to provide enough RG records to trigger inclusion in the CV training. The CV is big country, northern hemisphere seriously biased. So we have an uphill struggle to start with.
Here is the text I'm using for this one: "Russula sanguinea was described from a European mushroom and therefore probably isn't here in North America at all. The name has been applied to many red Russula in N. A. adding to the confusion. Out west where it may be sorted it is being called Russula rhodocephala which itself is a lookalike for Russula americana but under different trees according to Danny Miller http://www.alpental.com/psms/ddd/Russula/index.htm. Mushroomexpert's Kuo and Mycoquebec say that a lookalike under oaks in the east is Russula tenuiceps or R. sanguinaria under conifers/pines, but it is probably a group of species, and also not the same as the European one in the case of R. sanguinaria. We are trying to downvote these identifications for this reason. Hopefully, any people interested in identifying mushrooms will pitch in and help to vote any Russula that is being called Russula sanguinea in the eastern US back to genus level anyway, but we are concerned with a few other species too. Read fungee's journal post https://tinyurl.com/y9qqjf3z. Check out the master list https://tinyurl.com/y72e7fsb. Another thing that is daunting for Russula ID, there are well over a hundred known red Russula in the east, many are not named yet, and, if they are, the name is not in use."
We wiped this out in Eastern N. A. I will leave it in case someone wants to do the West.
That's good.
I'm hoping the recent changes to the CV suggestions list may reduce the number of incorrect ids in the future
It doesn't seem to be doing much good.
Weird that this taxa has the data for Russula sanguinaria attached to it and not sangiunea!
Not anymore.
iNat auto-linked to the wrong wikipedia page
This flag is not about curation, just re-identification, and I propose to mark it "resolved".
It is probably worth recording that from a curatorial perspective we can only change the application of taxon names either through simple taxon 'lumping' swaps where one name becomes a synonym of another, or through taxon splits. In this case they are driven by 'atlases' where we can use distribution information to split records and assign them to multiple different taxa according to where they are known to occur, with some certainty. Hopefully those splits are into multiple taxa at the same rank. Sometimes that isn't possible, because an appropriate species has not been described in a particular area, or multiple described taxa occur in the same area and cannot be distinguished. In these cases all we can do is push records back from incorrect species idents to genus level idents. I strongly believe this should happen because it improves data-quality but as you can imagine it causes a lot of angst when species-level idents get 'degraded' to genus. So, for me at least, when these kinds of mass changes are proposed they need to be accompanied by researched information on what area we are considering for a split, and what taxa it is being split into, and where, the supporting literature, and some demonstration of consensus that this is the best approach. The alternative is to tackle idents one-by-one with an explanation about why a name should not be used in a particular area, perhaps with a link to a journal entry so the same info does not have to be re-typed multiple times. For New Zealand at least I prefer that approach because it is less 'heavy-handed' and stimulates discussion - sometimes heated, but that's ok. That isn't a task we as curators can do. That needs the community.
So for many of these proposals we need more information. Is this just a flag to indicate that identifiers need to review records, or a request for a curatorial split. If so then info on what something should be split into and where (in an atlas sense), and the literature supporting that. In this case for example what taxa should the global records for R. sanguinea be split into and where? Not just Eastern NA. And in Eastern NA I assume the proposal is to push records back to Russula?