Also see the original study and its reassigning of subspecies at the end: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ddi.13234

The areas on the map that are in dark gray and light blue should be assigned to erminea, but instead only the areas within peninsular Alaska have. In addition, Baranof Island, which is inhabited by richardsonii, has been assigned to erminea.

Yeah. It seems to have been mostly appropriately done for Alaska, but in Canada it's quite messy. Also, the area marked 10 on the map is inhabited by richardsonii, but iNat seems to consider it a disjunct population of erminea.

Thanks! Makes sense, and it seems like there were no sampling localities for the High Arctic outside Alaska and Baffin, explaining the inconsistencies. That said, do we still follow Table 3 or Figure 4? And what do we do about the mix-up between 10 and 17, given that weasels from 10 were clearly sampled and found to be richardsonii, and the weasels from 17 sampled and found to be erminea? Should the range map be edited to reflect the appropriate range?

@jeremyhussell @ash2016 I have reviewed the source material, and realized the northern most range for the species was misinterpreted on my part. Figure 4 includes geographic made of the clades as acknowledged by a prior mitochondrial study on Mustela erminea (lato), which helped contextualize their own results. It is not their own geographic delineation. I have modified the range maps for Mustela richardsonii and M. erminea (stricto) based on their conclusion, Figure 1, and reorganization of subspecific taxa.

While there are holes in information - such as the lack of samples from Greenland - they do provisionally place the Greenlandic stoats (as well as others from northern, archipelagic Canada) in Mustela erminea. Pending future research, I believe it best reflects the study to follow suite on iNaturalist too. (Also of note, they assign the stoat of Baffin Island to Mustela richardsonii as well, well the stoats north of it belong to M. erminea).

I carried out a new taxon change to help reorganize some taxa in the Nearctic region - this unfortunately has pushed some observations to Mustela because the provinces of northern Canada are too large to conveniently divide observations where they need to go.

Also, the subspecies have been redistributed correctly under their respective species.

Baranof Island is part of the range map for Mustela richardsonii, but I overlooked it when I was reorganizing Atlas data. I have since fixed this, but without a taxon swap, observations won't be automatically switched to M. richardsonii.

Taxon swaps take processing power on the site. Since its such a small spot, I think it would be easier if we just manually id observations as Mustela richardsonii.