Flag for Taxon: grass-leaved goldenrods (Genus Euthamia)
| Flagger | Content Author | Content | Reason | Flag Created | Resolved by | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| choess | grass-leaved goldenrods (Genus Euthamia) |
it will need revision in light of Nesom's new treatment |
Aug. 28, 2021 12:56:58 +0000 | Not Resolved |
Comments
In response to popular demand, a key has now been produced: https://www.phytoneuron.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/44PhytoN-EuthamiaKey.pdf
I'd be reluctant to jump on that after talking to Marisa Szubryt (who published Euthamia research based on genetic sequencing the year before). I have taken the liberty of adding Euthamia hirtipes as a full species.
i really really don't understand why stuff like this can't be kept at the subspecies leve. I mean it's literally nearing the point where applied ecologists have to use old taxonomic schemes to be able to do inventories. This stuff is going to result in a rift in ecology with a 'correct' taxonomy barely anyone uses/
You haven't been in the range of most of these Euthamias, I take it. There's distinct differences in ecology and conservatism. Also a lot of them can't or barely hybridize so they really are separate species by almost any standard.
i don't know why any disagreement with taxonomic policy is always taken as, i must be ignorant or not know these species well. Please stick to the science instead of questioning other people's credentials, thanks.
if you strictly followed the hybridization rule, these might be at the species level, but we'd have to lump dozens if not hundreds of oak and willow taxa among other things to subspecies level. The 'hybrid rule' isn't actually a thing, at least not consistently. And yes subspecies often have different ecological niches.
I apologize, I don't intend to be questioning your credentials. I personally follow the phylogenetic species concept. At the end of the day we're trying to quantify a continuum so it's never going to be perfect.
I personally support subspecies for taxonomic entities that have a consistent intergrade zone of contact where the hybrids dominate. (Myrtle and Audubon's Yellow Rumped Warblers for example.).
Oaks frequently hybridize but the hybrids rarely dominate (I'm sure there are exceptions).
With many of these Euthamias they have different chromosome numbers and cannot or cannot easily intergrade. I don't personally agree with all of Nesom's splits but some of these species (Euthamia scabra vs carolina) which were formerly lumped, just are not each other's closest relatives.
Anyway, these changes have been put in place so I'm resolving the flag.
I've just run int the same thing any time i question how taxonomy is implemented, and i'm about burned out with it. No one listens without assuming i am ignorant or something. My point is the hybridization rule isn't followed when defining species, and things that used to fit well as subspecies are now elevated to species level, most are nearly impossible to identify in the field, and it causes a bunch of problems. But the splitters control iNat now, everyone jumped on the forum to tell me i'm a horrible person for not supporting extreme splitting that also changes common names of plants. So yeah. Sorry if i'm cranky. I do know what i'm talking about, but my opinions aren't tolerated around here
I'm re-opening the flag because I think it might have been marked "resolved" prematurely?
For example, Euthamia lanceolata has been accepted by POWO, and was (re-)split from a broad-sense E. graminifolia by Nesom (see the papers above). iNat currently recognizes it as E. graminifolia var. nuttallii, I think.
I think it might be better to address these things one-by-one. Here are the current names in POWO, which seems to have accepted all of Nesom's changes. I've tried to summarize the ways in which our taxonomy would have to change to align with Nesom/POWO. Bolded names are in Nesom/POWO but not iNat:
A. E. occidentalis - unchanged
B. E. graminifolia - Nesom restricts this to glabrous, Appalachian plants with longer involucres, splitting off hairier, more widespread plants into E. lanceolata. This aligns with iNat's current var. graminifolia and var. nuttallii, respectively. We could do an atlas-informed split, unfortunately with a large region of overlap.
C. E. lanceolata - Not currently recognized by iNat at species-level. See previous.
D. E. floribunda - added recently to iNat. A Greene species. It looks like this was added without a concomitant taxon split, which was probably appropriate for a limited-range species, but observations of Euthamia along the mid-Atlantic coast should probably be checked.
E. E. galetorum - Not currently recognized by iNat. Nesom segregates out some northeastern Euthamia populations, I think mostly from our current sense of E. caroliniana, into this resurrected Greene species.
F. E. caroliniana - Differs from our current sense by excluding populations Nesom now refers to E. galetorum, and probably others.
G. E. remota - Not currently recognized by iNat. Nesom segregates this Greene species from our current wide-sense E. gymnospermoides. Others have treated this as part of a broad-sense E. caroliniana (e.g. Michigan Flora).
H. E. gymnospermoides - would need to be split; see previous and next (and others?)
I. E. pulverulenta - Not currently recognized by iNat. Nesom splits this from E. gymnospermoides, but notes that Szuybryt et al. found them phylogenetically intermixed.
J. E. oklahomensis - Not currently recognized by iNat. Nesom splits a few populations, all in OK, from E. leptocephala and/or E. graminifolia var. nuttallii (his E. lanceolata).
K. E. scabra - added recently to iNat.
L. E. weakleyi - added recently to iNat; this is mostly a replacement name for the taxon previously referred-to as E. hirtipes, the type of which Nesom concludes is actually E. floribunda.
M. E. leptocephala - but would need to be split to accommodate E. pulverulenta (?)
Apologies if some detail is incorrect; I'm mostly trying to take inventory and understand whether we're intentionally deviating here.
I only have experience with B/C - E. graminifolia sensu lato. I live in central Pennsylvania, where Nesom maps both E. graminifolia sensu stricto and E. lanceolata. Last season I tried to find examples of both, but mostly found plants like this: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/130447516, with the long involucres of E. graminifolia s.s. and the (barely) hairy foliage of E. lanceolata. Some plants are quite a bit hairier than others, but I've been unable, in my haphazard and local sampling, to correlate that trait with involucre length. I have never found plants that were truly glabrous abaxially; the least hairy still have at least a few hairs along the midrib, so perhaps I've never encountered the "real" E. graminifolia (and my long involucre measurements might actually represent the difference between fresh and dried phyllaries).
According to his key paper, this is supposed to be one of the "easy" distinctions.
I personally think we should intentionally deviate from Nesom/POWO and not accept E. lanceolata until further work is published differentiating the two, preferably with some statistics. In the meantime the varieties can stand-in. Splitting E. graminifolia would be a large and potentially disruptive taxon change, and it would be nice to have more evidence to point folks to when explaining it.
PS I was also surprised to see some Rhopalomyia fusiformae galls (quite common on northern Euthamia) misidentified as "bulbils" in the first Nesom paper (pages 5, 55). Makes me wonder!
I agree, his key isn't the clearest and in my personal life I don't really acknowledge his Euthamia additions to my lifelist. (I prefer Szubryt et al 's paper that came out just before his). That P.S. is interesting...
well, you know i am going to agree, but i am increasingly disappointed with POWO too, and i wish i could convince iNat to abandon it, though i don't think i have much chance of that.
FWIW, I'm happy to close this flag now and wait until @marisaszubryt can give us a sounder foundation for these splits. I opened the flag because I could see this was going to be a messy split that needed extensive curation, but no one seems very eager to jump on this.
At-mentioning the most frequent ID'ers for this genus not already in this discussion:
@wdvanhem, @jayhorn, @srall, @tsn, @williambee, @arenicola, @seanblaney, @peakaytea, @maryah, @elacroix-carignan, @john_baur, @popb25, @ken_j_allison, @tadenham, @marykeim, @ericpo1, @gwynethgovers, @burkhard_plache, @bob_kahl, @andyfyon, @matt_g, @msatkinson, @csledge, @dryopteris2, @mjpapay, @sadawolk, @aarongunnar
So far, consensus seems to be to intentionally deviate from POWO (for all of the bolded new taxa above) for now.
Thank you for the heads up.
See https://www.phytoneuron.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/34PhytoN-Euthamia.pdf
This will require some taxon splits, extensive atlasing, and reidentification.