WoRMS Mollusca - Both an accepted and a doubtful page for genus Biomphalaria Preston, 1910

[jhnwllr]

Describe the problem:

https://github.com/gbif/portal-feedback/issues/3857

Link to effected CoL webpages: https://www.catalogueoflife.org/data/taxon/8R3YV https://www.catalogueoflife.org/data/taxon/7NQRN

[bart-v]

Not a WoRMS problem, but a COL problem Only one entry in WoRMS/MolluscaBase https://www.molluscabase.org/aphia.php?p=taxdetails&id=718742

[yroskov]

Hmm, interesting. I can find 3 entries for the genus Biomphalaria in the CoL (Apr 2022). One is flagged as "accepted", two others as "provisionally accepted", both have exceptionally paleo species as children (I can only say, it wasn't my "editorial decision" in the CLB to flag them "provisionally accepted):

Why (and on which stage) these records were split? (All 3 have the same parent, but different set of children species)

[yroskov]

Wonderful! Children species in two "provisionally accepted" genera have binomials made with completely other genera:

[bart-v]

Because some of the synonyms of Biomphalaria have accepted children. i.e. Australorbis = Biomphalaria https://www.molluscabase.org/aphia.php?p=taxdetails&id=1060374 Have 3 accepted species

In WoRMS this is allowed. Not ideal, but OK

In COL not allowed: so this creates this kind of "issue"...

[yroskov]

Taxonomic interoperability between different environments.

Let's put a pin in it for the future, @mdoering, @gdower

[mdoering]

@bart-v can you explain the meaning/rationale behind a synonym with accepted children? We will move such odd children to the accepted name of the synonym during imports. See also https://github.com/CatalogueOfLife/data/issues/434#issuecomment-1120632098 for more issues I spotted in Mollusca

[TonyRees]

Markus wrote:

@bart-v https://github.com/bart-v can you explain the meaning/rationale behind a synonym with accepted children?

From Tony: In IRMNG (which is based on the same software as WoRMS) both parents (e.g. a genus) and children (e.g. species) are maintained independently. So an editor may decide to synonymise a genus based on a particular source while omitting to move the children... or there may be multiple sources, one of which accepts the genus and one does not, and the children have only been synchronised with/imported from the first... so it is a manual task to move all children when a genus is made into a synonym, and does not break any (current) database referential integrity rules - but could be searched for via an automated routine of course, and flagged for an editor to fix up.

I would suggest more an oversight than anything else, although Bart may correct me here...

Of course a future iteration of the system could make it a software-enforced rule that an unaccepted parent cannot have accepted children, if the development/IT team decide to make it so...

• Tony

On Mon, 9 May 2022 at 14:47, Markus Döring @.***> wrote:

@bart-v https://github.com/bart-v can you explain the meaning/rationale behind a synonym with accepted children? We will move such odd children to the accepted name of the synonym during imports. See also #434 (comment) https://github.com/CatalogueOfLife/data/issues/434#issuecomment-1120632098 for more issues I spotted in Mollusca

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[mdoering]

Thanks Tony. Maybe COL should be more careful and simply drop all those taxa then. Seems like a main source for problems. Not simple to manage on our side though.

[bart-v]

Tony is correct. In maybe 50% of the cases it's just the editors that have not moved the children to the accepted parent yet.

BUT, in quite some cases this is on purpose, as a genus was marked as unaccepted and none or only part of the species were moved in that publication.

Basically we just need to live/deal with this...

[mdoering]

The problem of uncertain placement of species with a genus that is known to been removed is a problem we see in many systems, but each one deals with this problem differently. COL has adopted a recommendation to place such species under the next higher rank, e.g. family, and assign them a provisionally accepted status. Discussion and final conclusion at https://github.com/CatalogueOfLife/coldp/issues/45

A tough one to standardise...

[yroskov]

COL has adopted...

Whatever "CoL" adopted, our ability to clean up the mess, left in unresolved areas by taxonomists, is very limited. In many cases, we can only re-publish data as they delivered from the resources especially with automated updates.