Plant objective synonyms treated as "accepted species"

17707
Reporter: rdmpage
Type: Bug
Summary: Plant objective synonyms treated as "accepted species"
Priority: Major
Resolution: Fixed
Status: Closed
Created: 2015-07-21 16:52:02.364
Updated: 2016-07-08 16:29:08.461
Resolved: 2016-07-08 16:29:08.401
        
Description: Not sure how common this is, but here's an example where two plant names that are objective synonyms are both treated as "Accepted species" in the GBIF portal: *Poissonia heterantha* http://www.gbif.org/species/5629609 and *Coursetia heterantha* http://www.gbif.org/species/2959395, These two names are objective synonyms, and we have this information already available in the IPNI data dump. Both *Poissonia heterantha* and *Coursetia heterantha*  have the same "http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/BasionymID" value, namely "urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:520610-1 (I guess BasionymID is deprecated now).

So, in theory, it should be possible to catch these cases by checking for each value of  BasionymID whether there is more than one "Accepted species". This logically can't be the case.

There's also a bigger issue here, namely IPNI doesn't make any assertions about whether a name is "accepted" or not, so if and when IPNI is updated in GBIF there ar likely to be a bunch of names for which GBIF doesn't know which one is "accepted". For example, the latest (June 2015) edition of CoL has no information at all on *Poissonia heterantha*, despite the combination being published in 2003 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3094008. The Plant List, does have this name, and treats it as the accepted name for this taxon http://www.theplantlist.org/tpl1.1/record/tro-50233766. ]]>
    

Author: mdoering@gbif.org
Comment: The current backbone build algorithm only allows a single name from a group of names sharing the same basionym to be accepted. The backbone now treats Poissonia heterantha as an objective synonym
Created: 2016-07-08 16:28:04.035
Updated: 2016-07-08 16:29:04.934