Taxonomic Swap 61180
(Committed on 2019-09-26)
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Comments
Fine with me! Atlas of Living Australia has it under familiaris as well.
Does it affect the auto-captive flag by the system? I wouldn't want dingoes flagged captive in areas with lots of captive domestic dog observations.
I think the auto-captive system only marks observations at the species level (Canis familiaris), but I think @loarie would explain more. If this is an issue, I'm sure there is a work around.
Thanks for your 2 cents, @sea-kangaroo. I didn't know Atlas of Living Australia did the same thing.
@jwidness are Kri-kri observations (https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/783548-Capra-hircus-cretica) automatically marked as "captive"?
No, but I think the auto-flag only goes when there are at least 10 observations in the county level area that are already marked captive and there are no captive goat observations on Crete.
Relevant twitter thread on this topic (https://twitter.com/khelgen/status/1062474496223801345) and this Zootaxa paper argues for Canis familiaris for all domesticated dog breeds, including dingo (https://www.mapress.com/j/zt/article/view/zootaxa.4317.2.1). So Canis familiaris dingo seems like a safe bet.
I contacted @loarie about the issue that @jwidness raised. He states: "Yes the auto captive system would treat dingos with the rest of C. familiaris. That doesn't mean they'd all get marked as captive, it just means dingos would be considered C. familiaris by the auto captive situation in its calculations". He ensures that dingos would not automatically be marked as "captive", so I'm inclined to think that this swap is safe to make.
I find the fact that the dingo is a mere member of Canis familiaris fascinating and enlightening. However I have no idea what is the best way to manage this fact on iNat.So all I can say is,a big Thank You all for putting your collective minds to the task:)
At this point, the majority of actual domestic dog (Canis familiaris, Canis lupus familiaris, Canis familiaris familiaris, …) are no longer automatically marked as captive and are being treated as wild globally. For what it's worth, the appropriate species designations here remain hotly contested and are far from a settled matter, with very large camps of researchers supporting rather different nomenclature here. The summary would be that the domestic dog is split from the gray wolf and that the dingo is further split from that lineage. One treatment had filed them all under Canis lupus. It's all a question of different taxonomists wanting to draw the line of "species" at different places.
One note, though, is that part of the intention is to separate pet dog photos from wild individuals, and it really doesn't look like the system is able to handle this with the current subspecies set-up. So this really sets matters back a bit in terms of intended functionality.
@nateupham @jwidness @sea-kangaroo @maxallen
Thoughts? I don't think committing this change would be too disruptive/controversial. This draft would carry over the dingo's conversation status - literally the only thing that would change is the species epithet. Even the Australian Faunal Directory lists this as Canis familaris, not Canis lupus (https://biodiversity.org.au/afd/taxa/Canis_familiaris).