Taxonomic Swap 126996
(Committed on 2024-03-02)
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Comments
What happened to Ottleya? Is it being kept for any of these?
"Contrary to what morphological data may suggest, it does not seem possible to clearly delimit three monophyletic groups within the clade. Therefore, I am suggesting
that two genera should be recognized among American Loti at the present time, corresponding to the two clades recognized in molecular analyses: Hosackia and Acmispon (the oldest generic name available for the Acmispon clade). Given the ambiguity concerning the monophyly of lineages within Acmispon, I prefer not to recognize subgeneric taxa at the present time, even though the Syrmatium group appears monophyletic."
This seems a little strange. The author here acknowledges paraphyletic states of Acmispon, but also says there is ambiguity concerning the monophyly of the lineages. Is this enough justification enough to ignore the prior taxonomy of Ottleya and others? It feels more like an opinion piece.
Seems like there is controversy here. This taxon should possibly be flagged to not be changed back to Ottleya unless/until there is a firm consensus as it keeps flip-flopping on iNat. Note that looking on GoogleScholar there are very few papers that use Ottleya but just in the past few years there are a huge number that use Acmispon strigosus, which would indicate that, even if Ottleya is correct, it hasn't really been adopted by many people yet. The 2023 FNA treatment isn't online yet, so I'm not sure what they chose to do, but I'm guess maybe POWO is following that treatment.
It should be noted that the Legume Data Portal uses Acmispon strigosus, so that is one more strike against Ottleya, at least for the moment.
https://www.legumedata.org/taxonomy/taxon/2606097
Have they examined the Ottleya paper and decided it did not have good ground?
In that sense, I'm not sure why iNat made the change in the first place prematurely if Jepson and other places did not follow suite.
The Ottleya paper is from 1999, which was 25 years ago and 13 years before the the 2nd edition of The Jepson Manual. POWO cites personal communication with the Ottelya folks from 2021 saying they accept an alternative taxonomy. So, it sounds like there are rival Acmispon factions with some having Ottleya tendencies.
FNA vol 11 part 1 p 510 (Luc Brouillet) uses Acmispon. It cites Ottleya strigosa as a synonym but doesn't discuss reason for sticking with Acmispon. The intro to the genus Acmispon briefly discusses reasoning for separating Acmispon from Lotus and Hosackia, but doesn't mention Ottleya.
I always thought the Ottleya paper from 1999 was a little weak and most Southern California botanists continued to recognize Acmispon strigosus even after iNat adopted the name. We were going to use Acmispon strigosus in all three local annotated checklist projects (Orange, W. Riverside Co. and the desert regions of San Bernardino Co.), for example. And of course, the Jepson flora continued to recognize Acmsipon s. and I am not sure there were discussions to do otherwise. Interestingly though, there are two forms of A. strigosus in Southern California, a large and small-flowered form and Andy Sanders (UCR) at one point was considering taking a look into that at some point but I don't think he ever did.
I've never noticed the flower size difference but I've noticed some very different leaf forms, which has confused me. It wouldn't surprise me if it should be more than one taxon.
Formerly treated as Acmispon strigosus, moved to Ottleya, and currently treated in POWO as Acmispon again. See previous changes here.
Given the note under "Analyze Potential Disagreements" above, perhaps this should be part of a more inclusive swap.