Opuntia (prickly-pear) taxonomy in eastern North America

[Mike Burrell]

I was going to flag Opuntia humifusa for curation but in speaking with others thought that perhaps this issue should be raised here.

Recent work by Majure et al (2017) (https://biotaxa.org/Phytotaxa/article/view/phytotaxa.290.1.1) revised the O. humifusa complex in eastern North America. This change has been adopted by Michigan Flora and VASCAN, but none of the iNaturalist taxonomic authorities covering eastern United States appear to have been updated recently, so therefore do not reflect this update.

I basically just wanted to flag this for people who know more about plant taxonomy than I do to discuss and come to a consensus on. It is a fairly complex issue that, if adopted, would require many records to be swapped with different taxa (for instance, all of the Ontario records should be swapped to O. cespitosa).

More generally, it raises a larger question. As an every-day user of iNaturalist, how would I know whether iNaturalist has adopted a recent taxonomic update such as this? If I were in Ontario, do I follow what I see has been adopted by VASCAN and Michigan Flora (two authorities that most Ontario botanists follow) and report as O. cespitosa, since both O. cespitosa and O. humifusa are available to me?

Mike

[Charlie Hohn]

As of right now iNat taxonomy is tied to a few secondary sources, we don't change taxonomy based on primary references for a variety of reasons. See https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/curator+guide#policies .  The complexity you note is one of the reasons it is this way! Otherwise it becomes a huge confusing mess and the site becomes mostly unusuable for anyone who's not a taxonomist. However, you may have feedback on which secondary sources to use, etc... and that would be welcome here! This is an ongoing question and for some taxa (amphibians for instance) a different approach is being tried.

[Scott Loarie]

Hi Mike,

These taxonomy questions are tricky. I think everyone is open to suggestions for improvements.

Where we have 'complete' sources (e.g. for the order Aves we have the Clements source which is complete in that it includes every descendant bird species), its easy to find out whats going on by comparing which species are included and which are excluded (e.g. if species X is missing, that must mean its included in species Y) atlases and range maps (http://www.inaturalist.org/pages/atlases) also help by making distributions more explicit. 

In fact, we recently added the ability (admin only for now) to mark clades as globally 'complete', which changes a bit how the taxon page is rendered. For example, the lizard genus Anolis has 416 extant descendant species. I've marked the taxon page for Anolis as 'complete' and you can see it now shows '201 out of 416' above the seasonality graph http://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/36362-Anolis also under the 'trends' tab we can now calculate 'discoveries' and 'wanted' as we march towards this 416 number.

I've also experimented with trying to rally communities around these clades. For example, the main communication platform for the anole science community is Jonathan Losos at Harvar'ds AnoleAnnals blog. I recently guest blogged to see whether this community is interested in helping add obs and IDs to help reach this goal of '416 out of 416':

http://www.anoleannals.org/2017/09/13/help-train-inaturalists-artificial-intelligence-to-identify-anole-species-from-photographs/

The main point I wanted to make is that there's no substitute for having globally complete sources for a clade. We currently have them for some groups like Birds, Reptiles, Amphibians, Fishes, and Mammals. They make understanding what iNaturalist means (e.g. by O, cespitosa does iNaturalist mean obs from both these regions or just this region) from a global perspective. For plants, there sadly aren't any great global sources. There's the Plant List from Kew. And Kew is very excited about its successor http://www.plantsoftheworldonline.org/ but that won't be ready for a few years. The patchwork of sources we currently have for plants has huge problems in terms of establishing clear a global perspective. The reasoning behind the strategy is that most 'pitchforks' tend to come out from local perspectives so giving more 'power' to local perspectives (rather than say, everyone use the Plant List) would minimize pitchforks. But I'm not sure I agree that this is worth it given the kinds of confusion issues you raise.

As Charlie mentioned, I've been experimenting with this idea of a global, complete, community driven taxonomy for a clade that I'm piloting with Amphibians: http://www.inaturalist.org/journal/loarie/11101-internal-reference-taxonomies-amphibian-pilot it was motivated because some people had issues with the Amphibian Species of the World taxonomy as the external source. It seems to be working well, but it requires a 'taxonomy tzar' for the clade (me in this amphibian case) and it involves a bit of work.

I was going to propose that we extend this approach to Reptiles for similar issues relating to the Reptile Database. For example, the Tortoise and Freshwater Turtle Specialist Group http://www.iucn-tftsg.org/ is interested in doing outreach with the turtle community similar to the anole post above, but they take issue with a few things in the Reptile Database, specifically, they want iNat to:

1. Split Kinosternon abaxillare from Kinosternon scorpioides

2. Split Kinosternon steindachneri from Kinosternon subrubrum

3. Swap Kinosternon arizonense as  Kinosternon stejnegeri

4. Split Pseudemys floridana from Pseudemys concinna

5. Split Chersobius from Homopus (e.g. Chersobius boulengeri, Chersobius signatus, & Chersobius solus)

6. Swap Malayemys isan with Malayemys khoratensis

7. Split Cuora cyclornata from Cuora trifasciata 

8. Split Emys pallida from Emys marmota

9. Lump Trachemys emolli into Trachemys grayi

10. Split Chelonoidis guntheri, Chelonoidis microphyes and Chelonoidis vandenburghi from Chelonoidis vicina

Were we to do this, we could follow something similar to what I'm piloting with Amphibians and say: we mostly use the Reptile Database but it differs in the following ways. If you have strong feelings with Reptile taxonomy join the discussion here....

Similarly, were there support for experimenting more with this approach, you could try to take on the role of global Opuntia taxonomy tzar, and we could say for plants we use this mixed approach for everything except the clade Opuntia for which we take a community driven approach.

What do folks think about allowing 'global, complete, community driven taxonomy for a clade' approach for certain clades? The most obvious downsides to me is that (a) it takes work, so who are these tzars who are going to take on curating a clade and will they follow through on their responsibilities, and (b) that kinds of local pitchforks can we expect (e.g. 'here in California we use Jepson and it doesn't recognize O. cespitosa!') and can those pitchforks be diffused via a community mediated process similar to http://www.inaturalist.org/journal/loarie/11101-internal-reference-taxonomies-amphibian-pilot ?

Sorry for this long post. This 'global, complete, community driven taxonomy for a clade' approach is something I'm getting kind of personally excited about (though I can't say the same for the rest of the iNat staff). But there's also the 'lets just switch to the Plant List' solution for dealing with plant taxonomy (even more generally 'lets just switch to the GBIF backbone' for everything) that has also been proposed which would surely be simpler and might be better.

-Scott

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Scott R. Loarie, Ph.D.
Co-director, iNaturalist.org
California Academy of Sciences
55 Music Concourse Dr
San Francisco, CA 94118
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