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Hi @jakob, by spliting the species into subspecies and creating atlases for each subspecies, I could also assign each observation which were previously only identified down to species level, to appropriate subspecies.
Thanks, @heteropteran, I expected something along these lines. However, I'm not sure whether taxonomic changes are the appropriate tool to identify many observations automatically to a finer taxonomic level. The tool is principally meant to update iNat's taxonomy, and a split is usually applicable where the original concept of what Taxon A means has been changed to Taxon A' and Taxon B. That's clearly not the case here. I feel that should be addressed in a different way as in this case Prostemma guttula is still based on the same concept after the split while users whose observations have been updated might think that the species has been split in some way. Hope I could explain my thoughts and looking forward to yours!
You are right that the definition of "split" function does not fit well with the action that I used it for. However, I could not find any other tool that automatically assigns subspecies identifications to observations with corresponding species identification, according to distribution atlas of the subspecies. I think we should ask developers to include an appropriate function for this purpose.
Please raise this suggestion in the iNat forum https://forum.inaturalist.org
In the meanwhile, please do not use the taxon split in future cases where you would like to add subspecies IDs to observations without a change of the taxonomic parent. Many thanks!
Hi @heteropteran, I'm a bit puzzled by this taxon change - why would you split a species into subspecies if the species itself isn't changed? If the subspecies weren't available, you would simply add them as taxonomic children of the respective species, leaving the latter unaltered. Maybe I'm missing something, hence curious to hear why the taxon change was set up like that.