[Taxacom] Revision using taxonomic concept approach

[Stephen Thorpe]

The Berendsohn paper (and everything alse I have seen on the topic) just isn't very clear! Several distinct issues appear to be conflated. One specific issue which I can understand concerns lumping/splitting of genera. The same generic epithet (with the same type species) can be used to refer to different generic concepts. In such cases, if you simply identify a species as X sp., the question can be asked "What concept of X?" A good (actually bad!) example would be Nothofagus. If I said that a plant specimen is a Nothofagus sp., I could mean Nothofagus in the traditional (sensible) sense, or Nothofagus in the restricted (idiotic!) sense of Heenan & Smissen. However, the "sec" terminology doesn't really work that well here. We could say Nothofagus sec Heenan & Smissen, and that seems meaningful, but what shall we call the alternative, i.e. Nothofagus in the traditional sense. Nothofagus sec ???

Stephen

--------------------------------------------
On Fri, 23/10/15, Nico Franz <nico.franz at asu.edu> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Revision using taxonomic concept approach
 To: "TAXACOM" <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
 Received: Friday, 23 October, 2015, 3:26 PM
 
 Thanks, all.
 
    The "sec." is officially due to Berendsohn
 (1995):
 http://www.bgbm.org/biodivinf/docs/PotentialTaxa/PotentialTaxa.pdf
 
    Some of this practice is quite
 longstanding, by now, and my (incomplete)
 understanding is that folks such as Jim Croft and Greg
 Whitbread at
 the Australian
 National Botanic Gardens (and of TDWG fame) first developed
 this kind of
 annotation for herbarium databases that could hold multiple
 taxonomic
 views, some 25 years ago.
 
 Cheers, Nico
 _______________________________________________
 Taxacom Mailing List
 Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
 http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
 The Taxacom Archive back to 1992 may be searched at: http://taxacom.markmail.org
 
 Celebrating 28 years of Taxacom in 2015.