It has not yet been formally described (as with the species on most other hosts), and we don't use provisional names on iNaturalist. I am keeping this draft until the other species in this complex are described, then the split can be committed. I implemented the complex because one species was recently described in it other than Hesperomyces virescens (Hesperomyces halyziae, which was added to the database).

just to throw an idea out there, I think it would be useful to turn all H. virescens complex identifications into H. harmoniae. 99.999% of observations are on H. axyridis, so it would be much, much, MUCH easier for a couple of people to go through all of the (now) H. harmoniae observations and bump up the observations that aren't on H. axyridis. Even without doing this, the data would more accurately reflect the reality. If a couple of people are willing to do this, we could get to a quite accurate set of data orders of magnitude faster and more efficiently than by having to go through each and every observation and re-ID everything. Especially because people love piling on IDs, so many observations would require a number of IDs from different people to get them to the right ID.

I was talking with @nschwab about this, too. I've been trying to weed out at least those observations that have Hesperomyces virescens as Research Grade, which are definitely wrong (He. virescens (s.s. and s.l.) are found on Chilocorus sp., and I haven't seen a single one of those on iNat). Bumping everything to He. harmoniae would definitely be very helpful and save a ton of time. I've been saving observations that have Hesperomyces on a host that isn't Harmonia, so changing the ID there should be pretty easy.

Is that not something that's possible? Like @davidenrique said, even bulk changing the genus would make the IDs much more accurate across the board, and then a few users can easily fix those with different hosts. The observations that are now Complex He. virescens are technically correct, but there's another 1350 observations of He. virescens that are absolutely incorrect. It's doable but pretty menial work.

Part of the reason too is that leaving this taxon swap until every single species is formally described could take decades (some of them are very rare, it's unlikely that the list above has all of them, and Laboulbeniales are awful to gather DNA from).

In the interests of moving this on, I've just gone through the H. virescens observations for Ontario and Quebec and IDed them as either H. harmoniae or H.v. Complex. I've asked the mods if we could open a forum topic to solicit local volunteers to go through the observations in their locales. Not sure whether that's a proper application of the forum but this is a citizen science venue so it seems reasonable enough that it's worth asking.

Thanks for the explanation, I understand the philosophy.

It's a bit of an unusual situation here where the species used to be correct but now isn't (not just a small split) - at the time that Hesperomyces virescens s.l. was ID'd on ~1800 observations, this was correct. But now, because that one species holds many cryptic ones, those IDs are all wrong, through no fault of anyone. That means there's now a lot of observations that we know are wrong, sometimes with a dozen or so IDs by people clicking agree, which will be incredibly hard to change.

Rolling it backwards to Complex Hesperomyces virescens at least helps correct the observations from all being wrong - am I reading it right in that that's what you're planning to do? That already helps a lot.

I understand the argument, but I disagree with it. Slippery slope arguments can be valid, but only if there is a very clear and fairly unavoidable sequence of events that leads from one thing to the next. In this case, I think it's more of a slippery slope fallacy. There is no reason why the taxon change strategy I proposed would invariably lead to abuse of the taxon curation system. We have very good and clear reasons to do it, and I think the strategy is a good one in other similar cases as well. It always bothers me when the only argument for not doing something in one particular case is that we shouldn't do it in OTHER, unrelated cases. That's not an argument for not doing something in the particular case in question.

I think that two of the main criteria for making taxon changes should be whether they are useful and whether they allow the data to more closely reflect reality. In this case, turning H. virescens complex IDs into H. harmoniae IDs would make the observation data set FAR more accurate and useful, and it would also save people a LOT of work. Work that could be spent improving other iNat taxa rather than wasting it doing work that doesn't need to be done. If the slippery slope fallacy is a concern, then we could set the precedent that taxon changes like these need the approval of an administrator. That additional level of quality assurance should make the slope a whole lot less slippery.

One of the reasons why I love the iNat system is because it is so powerful. I don't think we should be afraid of harnessing the power for good. We should be careful, sure, but not using the tools we have available to the best of our ability is something we should also be afraid of.

I will now try to locate which are the observations that do not belong to Hesperomyces harmoniae under the name Hesperomyces virescens.

Thank you for that! Those on Olla v-nigrum and Psyllobora should still be Complex Hesperomyces virescens (as indicated at the top of the page), but those on Scymnus are Hesperomyces coccinelloides.

At least one of the individuals opted out of community ID is deceased. If I understand @loarie , the He. v. IDs are going to revert to Complex He.v. at some point, which should deal with that issue. At any rate, last time I checked there were 7 He.v. IDs in the system. That didn't take long.