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implement autonyms #457

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mfrasca opened this issue Oct 18, 2018 · 8 comments
Open

implement autonyms #457

mfrasca opened this issue Oct 18, 2018 · 8 comments
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enhance let's make it better ghini-3.2 taxonomy taxonomy-related

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@mfrasca
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mfrasca commented Oct 18, 2018

quoting (and paraphrasing) @RoDuth:
»if a subspecies, etc. is created of a species then the type species automatically gets a subsp. name that mirrors the species epithet. E.g. when they decided that the Araucaria cunninghamii from PNG was a variety and named it Araucaria cunninghamii var. papuana then« ( Araucaria cunninghamii automatically became a synonym of Araucaria cunninghamii var. cunninghamii).

the other way, quoting (with minor added text) @Ejgouda:
»the moment Aechmea minor f. ubi-major becomes a synonym of an other taxon, Aechmea minor f. minor (its autonym) does not exist any longer (not needed), but in the database there are probably many references pointing to that record, like identifications etc. I solve this problem by considering Aechmea minor f. minor synonym to Aechmea minor by making it synonym to the latter. (which amounts to changing the verse of the synonymy link between the two)«

it would be good to have support for this in the software.

in practice, when you add an infraspecific taxon to a species, the species gets an automatic authonym and this autonym becomes the accepted name for the taxon. there is no extra author for it, as there is no publication other than the original species publication.
when you remove the last infraspecific taxon at a given rank from a species, its automatic autonym at that rank should be removed, or become a transparent synonym to the species.
I can imagine cases like knowing of the existence of infraspecific taxa for a species, but not having them in the collection, so that you would want to add the autonym manually, and that it stays in the database even in absence of siblings at the same rank.
@mfrasca mfrasca added ghini-3.2 enhance let's make it better labels Oct 18, 2018
@Ejgouda
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Ejgouda commented Oct 18, 2018 via email

@mfrasca
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mfrasca commented Oct 19, 2018 via email

@Ejgouda
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Ejgouda commented Oct 19, 2018 via email

@mfrasca
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mfrasca commented Oct 21, 2018

when you say "infraspecific epithets should be unique within a species", you mean across ranks, don't you? e.g.: once you have taken 'viridiflora' for a subspecies, the same 'viridiflora' cannot be assigned to a variety of the same species, is this correct?

@Ejgouda
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Ejgouda commented Oct 23, 2018 via email

@mfrasca
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mfrasca commented Oct 25, 2018

if you use the epithet viridiflora for an infraspecific taxon, whatever rank, you can not use it for an other rank

but the "you can not use", is it a guarantee that it never happened, so we don't need to represent it in the database? I'm thinking of homonyms… (same rank, same epithet, other publication)

so: I cannot enforce uniqueness in the database table, or I would rule out homonyms.

OTOH, ranks in the range Ordo-Subtribus use suffixes that guarantee against cross-rank name clashes, but I've also seen epithets that didn't reveal the rank.

so: are cross-rank homonyms a possibility?

@Ejgouda
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Ejgouda commented Oct 25, 2018 via email

@RoDuth
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RoDuth commented Oct 31, 2018

in practice, when you add an infraspecific taxon to a species, the species gets an automatic authonym and this autonym becomes the accepted name for the taxon. there is no extra author for it, as there is no publication other than the original species publication.

This is not the right way to do it. You can have a pool of accessions pointing to it and you do not know if there are accessions in between that are the new infraspecific taxon. Also when in a new identification when you can not decide which infraspecific taxon it is, you just identify it on species level.

I think I am just repeating @Ejgouda here...

A word of warning about autonyms. This must be a manual step, per accession and no forced use of nor inclusion of the autonym. I noted autonyms not because I wanted ghini to fix them for me but because they were an example of when following the strict rules of taxonomy in a world which is filled with commercial nursery, hobbyist collectors and specialist breeders, etc. could come unstuck for the average user.

In a practical working living collection the taxonomy is often full of inconsistencies and disputes, etc. As @Ejgouda points out.

Of course it is possible to publish an invalid or illegitimate name, so you do not rule it out in the database

@mfrasca mfrasca added the taxonomy taxonomy-related label Mar 26, 2020
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