eButterfly Taxonomy Updated

Months in the making, we’ve just made substantial improvements and corrections to the taxonomic backbone for eButterfly. This will drastically improve the user experience when entering checklists and exploring data.

The eButterfly taxonomy is a hierarchical approach to creating a butterfly list for checklist data entry and identifications. Users can now select a taxon from any level that best represents their identification for the observation: superfamily Papilionoidea (butterflies), family, subfamily, genus, species, or subspecies (coming soon). If you have a butterfly sighting or image on your checklist and you have no idea what it is, now it can be identified at the superfamily level – butterfly. Or maybe you know it is a swallowtail, but you’re not sure which species. You can select the subfamily Papilioninae (swallowtails). If possible, other users will eventually help you identify it to species, which improves the eButterfly database and perhaps helps you learn too.The eButterfly taxonomy generally follows the Illustrated Lists of American Butterflies (Warren et al. 2017: http://www.butterfliesofamerica.com). The eButterfly taxonomy will be updated at the beginning of each year (January-February) based on new taxonomic discoveries, updates, and perhaps expansions to other regions. Currently, eButterfly can be used from Alaska through Canada south to Panama, and including Hawaii, Bermuda and the Caribbean islands. We now have 3,040 species in 685 genera in the eButterfly taxonomy. Each year the eButterfly taxonomy will be archived (with a detailed change summary) and made available for download. A new web page for this is being created at eButterfly.

For this update, we corrected many small errors in the eButterfly taxonomy. This included:

• Parent-child relationships between taxonomic entities were improved and corrected.
• Duplicate entries that referred to the same species were merged.
• Formatting issues for some common and scientific names were corrected.
• A new system for preserving taxonomic order more consistently was implemented.

After all of these corrections were completed and verified, we used a sophisticated computer script to correct and update every user’s observations in eButterfly. For example, the eButterfly taxonomy accidentally had Scudder’s Sulphur as a duplicate misspell and counted it as two species: Colias scudderi and Colias scudderii. If you used one of those on a checklist and later used the other spelling on another checklist, your life list would have counted those as two different species and inflated your life list. Mistakes like these have been corrected and merged. Or perhaps you have a Plains Branded Skipper on a checklist. This was previously a subspecies of the Western Branded Skipper and has been upgraded to a species in eButterfly (Hesperia colorado assiniboia to Hesperia assiniboia). Maybe your life list gained a species if you reported this species on a checklist. A full list of changes can be found below. Some features in the website interface do not yet take advantage of some of these updates and changes to the taxonomy. Our programmers are now updating and standardizing all data queries and filters across the eButterfly software to correctly display results. Meanwhile, if you notice any changes that might be incorrectly implemented for your observations, please send us a detailed report using an eButterfly support ticket at https://help.e-butterfly.org. We are working on many more exciting features and upgrades that target user requests. Keep the feedback coming and help us make eButterfly better for everyone.

Thank you for eButterflying!

eButterfly Taxonomy Change Summary