selection common name on the species page

migrated from: https://code.google.com/p/ala/issues/detail?id=296 date: Mon Nov 11 15:00:55 2013 author: milo_nic...@hotmail.com

feedback submitted -

An enormous number of main plant names shown in bold type in ALA records are similarly as obscure, though not as bad as the above example eg Afghan Apple for Citrullus lanatus, the last name in a list of alternative common names for that species in Plants of Western New South Wales, or Dead Finish for Acacia carneorum. The gazetted common name for this species, gazetted as Vulnerable federally and in NSW, is Purple-Wood Wattle. URL http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/threatenedspeciesapp/profile.aspx?id=10007

The priorities for the program which decides on the common name to use as header should be: first, names gazetted by the various States and the Commonwealth as common names for threatened species and weeds. This is particularly important for weeds because all the State and Commonwealth materials use to common names as an initial entry point to their publications. For plants not so gazetted, only the first name recorded as a common name in a Flora published by as State or Territory or the Flora of Australia (if there is a list given by a particular Flora) should be picked up by the program. Plants of Western New South Wales (which I mentioned above) should also be used. It was written by staff of CSIRO Plant Industry. Such staff these days would work at the Australian National Herbarium.
If the common names differ, the Flora of Australia name should be used. If there is no Flora of Australia or Plants of Western New South Wales (another Commonwealth publication) common name, then a name used by a State Flora could be picked at random from the above list. That way, hopefully, you will annoy all the States and Territories equally when their particular name has not been used as the main bold common name.

Using these criteria, the common name for Citrullus colocynthis would be Colocynth, and the common name for Citrullus lanatus would be Wild Melon.

I am particularly concerned about this because people who ask my help about plants are using the ALA bolded common names, and they are in many cases extremely obscure. We are rapidly getting to a stage where people who are professional or knowledgeable amateurs about plants use one common name for a plant and those who trust ALA will use something else.

AtlasOfLivingAustralia / bie-webapp2

selection common name on the species page #13