Flag for Taxon: smooth white violet (Viola pallens)
| Flagger | Content Author | Content | Reason | Flag Created | Resolved by | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| rynxs | smooth white violet (Viola pallens) |
synonym swap discussion |
May. 20, 2022 05:31:50 +0000 | ddennism |
Taxon changes committed |
Comments
Added a merge, since apparently POWO is now in agreement with the paper: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes/116887
@ballardh @the_land_philosopher are you in agreement that Viola pallens (Banks ex Ging.) Brainerd is a synonym of V. palustris subsp. palustris?
It's not quite so simple as that: a lot of the plants previous reference sources identified as V. pallens would now be placed under the name V. minuscula. There is extensive, though disorganized, discussion on Harvey Ballard's website: https://people.ohio.edu/ballardh/vgpena/taxa/violapalustris.htm and other pages (since he hasn't answered yet). So I guess all the V. pallens observations here will have to be reexamined to see which current description they fit, V. palustris or V. minuscula. But while waiting for that, and in the case of all those that won't be clearly identified from the photos, they should not be filed under V. palustris, which, as currently understood, has a strictly northern range. V. minuscula is less restricted.
@rynxs re: proposed merge
According to Marcussen et al. (2022), pp. 79-80, these two species are both in Subsection Stolonosae, and one is the allopolyploid progeny of the other. The authors write, "The delimitation of this subsection is 'locked' by the existence of allopolyploids between distantly related internal lineages, one of which happens to be the type of the subsection (Viola palustris). The polyploids include... the Amphiatlantic V. palustris (8x) which is the alloploid of V. minuscula (=V. pallens auct., non (Banks) Brainerd; 4x) and V. epipsila (4x)..." The authors were able to identify four clades within Stolonosae (but did not give them names, dropping informal ones they'd used in their previous paper). They found V. epipsila in the 3rd and V. minuscula in the 4th, and grouped V. palustris with the former.
So, split V. pallens into V. palustris and V. minuscula?
The current 280 (surprisingly few) observations of V. pallens correspond in distribution very well with the USDA range map for V. minuscule. They correspond poorly with V. palustris and not at all with V. epipsala. Both Marcussen et al. and Ballard indicate that "auct." used "V. pallens" for what would have correctly been V. minuscula, even if the type of pallens turns out to have been a specimen of palustris. So I feel pretty certain that most, if not all, of the iNat identifiers who chose tto call something V. pallens were thinking of V. minuscula.
That "auct." includes Fernald (1950) and therefore Peterson and Newcomb.
Aha! I figured out why there are so few observations for V. pallens. They're all filed under V. macloskeyi, because a lot of recent sources call this taxon V. macloskeyi ssp. pallens (the widely accepted name until 2015) or var. pallens:
https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=VIMAP3
https://wisflora.herbarium.wisc.edu/taxa/index.php?taxauthid=1&taxon=6943&cl=23
But at least V. macloskeyi sensu stricto and V. minuscula don't overlap in range at all and it'll be perfectly easy to sort them out. See here:
http://botanikim.com/2017/06/16/viola-macloskeyi/
I concur that the change should be a merge of V. pallens into V. minuscula.
Regardless of what the type specimen of V. pallens is, the popular concept of V. pallens directly matches V. minuscula. Looking at all the observations ID'd as V. pallens on iNat, I can only find one observation that could potentially represent someone thinking of V. palustris when they used the ID "V. pallens" (it at least has light purple petals), but this is probably actually a misidentified early-in-the-season V. cucullata anyway (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/688834). There are many misidentifications in there, but no others that suggest an intention to use "V. pallens" to mean a form of V. palustris, as currently circumscribed.
(Also agree that V. macloskeyi should be broken up with an atlased split into the restricted sense of V. macloskeyi and V. minuscula. )
This is related to an ill-advised change committed thoughtlessly here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes/110789
@ddennism are you willing to handle this? You'll have to create a new taxon change, since the one I made is (intentionally) locked from being committed due to having both a parent and a child taxon. We just had a similar situation with Carex alascana, where the species concept applied for C. gynocrates was, by necessity, synonymous with C. nardina.
yeah sure
V. pallens change drafted here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes/125424
V. pallens var. pallens change committed here (ID only ever used twice):
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes/125425
POWO synonymizes with V. macloskeyi: https://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:868881-1
This paper synonymizes with V. palustris: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.22.489152v1.full.pdf
Either way, the nominate subspecies should probably be swapped into the species.