Hi Jeff,

I have included a screen capture of my clements taxonomy. It seems that in Clements 2004 Trumpeter finch was assigned to the genus Bucanetes and Rhodopechys.

Rhodopechys had sub species, Bucanetes does not.

I have entered a sub species under Rhodopechys and the nominate form under Bucanetes.

Once corrected this will show a 935/11 species, subspecies split which would be correct.

Could I return to my original question about subspecies not being shown as species where the nominate form has not been seen?


Mark

Hi Jeff

I've encountered the same species/subspecies "bug" as Mark in trip (& location) reports.  Any species recorded trinomially (e.g. Red-billed Toucan cuvieri) is counted as a subspecies only, even in cases where it is the only form of the parent species recorded.  For example, the totals (Clements 2005 tax list) on the trip (or location) report for a visit to Ecuador I made a few years ago are 166 species/2 subspecies instead of the correct 168 species/2 subspecies. 

I've read the "Total number of entries" thread & take the various points you make there.  However, the species/subspecies situation  gets weirder.  As an experiment, I changed one of the miscounted subspecies (Red-billed Toucan cuvieri) back to the parent form (Red-billed Toucan) & then ran the trip report.  The totals now read 167 species/2 subspecies with the RB Toucan appearing twice, once as Red-billed Toucan & once as Red-billed Toucan cuvieri.  As another experiment, I created a dummy sighting so that my Ecuador trip list now contained 2 RB Toucan subspecies: cuvieri (as before) & inca.  The trip totals now become 166 species/3 subspecies.  In cases such as these, simply adding species to subspecies will not give the correct "species" figure nor is there any other way of obtaining it short of going through the list & looking at the individual entries.

Fred Petersen
Reno, Nv 

Jeff,

I think we are going in the right direction.

Any trip,life or year list should feature clearly the number of species seen.

I am not sure subspecies are important in this feature. Of course I do remember when we did not have clements and the howls of protest then.

Also remember that the nominate is a taxa too, if we show only other taxa as a subspecies, then that will be inaccurate.

So I think we need on all lists the number of species whatever subspecies they are.

In addition the number of sightings could be useful but not highlighted in the top right hand corner. Perhaps at the end.

Regards

Mark

PS. Keep up the good work.

Hi Jeff

Sorry to have muddied the waters with my comments.  I certainly didn't mean to imply that the proposed solution in the other thread wouldn't solve the problems mentioned, but was merely calling attention to what struck me as interesting peculiarities in the way things worked now. 

Re your proposed solution, I would expand it slightly as follows:

1. Number of full species.  (= in Linnean terms the number of separate binomials whether part of a trinomial or not)

2. Number of subspecies (= number of  separate trinomials)

3. Number of "forms"  (= full species + those subspecies not already accounted for in the full species list)

4. Number of sightings

Anyway, that's my 2 cents.

Regards, Fred