IOC vs Clements (1 Viewer)

[SzimiStyle]

It has been clear that IOC and Clements handles taxonomy differently. But I have a simple question. Is the recent Clements update is a criticism over the IOC list or the Cornell staff is just way behind their schedule to follow and accept every changes appeared in the past future.

Just for fun and for curiosity I have created my Clements list by importing my existing list from my IOC (bubo.org) list. My life list is not that big but I had to add quite a lot species manually as simply they were not found by Clements. That is not a surprise though. What surprised me is that quite a few species splits has been accepted by IOC a long time ago while Clements has no action on it (e.g. White-browed Coucal vs Burchell's Coucal).

Best, Szimi
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[njlarsen]

It has been my impression that Clements have initially wanted to follow regional authorities, such as AOU in the US, BOU for (Britain and) Europe, and the Australian checklist for that area. They have in the last two editions caught up on some other regions (at least partly), but there seems still to be some ways to go.

Niels

 

[DLane]

In addition, if it hasn't already been made clear by other comments in other threads in this forum, the IOC tends to accept many splits without the support of peer-reviewed publications, which is not a practice used by several of the checklist committees followed by the Clements team. In many cases, I suspect these 'field guide' splits will be vindicated, but others are likely to be over-enthusiastic errors. Publications are slow to come out, but I think that Clements is 'playing it safe', whereas IOC will have to reverse many decisions in the face of published evidence once it finally sees the light of day. Which is the better system? I'll leave that up to you to decide.

 

[wintibird]

The Clements list also has the tendency to accept only English peer-reviewed publications and to ignore any papers published in another language...

However, I'm regularly comparing the two lists for the Opus and they are getting closer to each other.

André

 

[thomasdonegan]

I agree with Dan here. I have spent quite a lot of time this year considering a delta between IOC and SACC for Colombian bird species. It is amazing how quickly one can compare sonograms nowadays on xeno-canto to assess whether some of these approaches are supported by vocal data.

This review highlighted some instances where the SACC are off-piste, in some cases even where proposals have been made and rejected (e.g. W/E Woodhaunters, purpurata/saphirina Quail-Doves). We will be making some changes to the Colombian list this year to deal with some of these and publishing the rationale for doing so. That is not that I expect the SACC to change too, because they seem obsessed with sticking with Peters ahead of Ridgely unduly on species limits issues and are subjectively picky about whose papers they follow (see the other posting on Zimmerius thread).

I'll stop whining about the SACC now. The main point of this post was to note surprise at just how many of the IOC splits for Colombia are decidedly dodgy or poorly supported by vocal considerations. There are a number of IOC splits in groups for which hybridisation has been reported but not fully investigated (e.g. Pteroglossus toucans), which are based on molecular studies with patchy geographic coverage (e.g. Hemispingus), or which are PSC splits for vocally very similar birds (e.g. Aulacorhynchus prasinus group toucanets). Many of these treatments based on current data do not seem supported under the BSC. At least, there genuinely is not enough published or even unpublished vocal data to assess some of them. In several instances, within-one-country-variation has been spotted in a field guide, but there are more complex patterns when variation across a "species'" distribution as a whole is considered and current approaches involve over-simplistic biogeographical treatments (e.g. Sirystes, Formicivora). As Dan notes, some of these splits will prove to be good, some not, some good in part, and in some instances, even more splits than even IOC currently considers the case will be required.

 

[Mysticete]

Clements is undoubtedly more conservative, although given that they update once a year compared to the 4 or so time IOC does, it does make sense. I would just argue that IOC and Clements have both had instances of splitting/lumping/resplitting in some taxa, some of it not very well supported.

 

[lewis20126]

Clements is undoubtedly more conservative, although given that they update once a year compared to the 4 or so time IOC does, it does make sense. I would just argue that IOC and Clements have both had instances of splitting/lumping/resplitting in some taxa, some of it not very well supported.

I agree with this; now that TSS is in charge, Clements is following SACC (so conservative here) although is accepting "field guide splits" and other splits without published data for Asia, some of which may be a little premature IMO. I assume that there will be increasing congruence over the years although IOC will presumably always have more splits at any point in time given the 4+ updates a year.

cheers, alan