I am afraid that I had not picked up on this thread until Charles Roper kindly sent me an e-mail about it - I only routinely monitor the Species Dictionary section of the Forum.
You will see that this thread started in January 2008 and I dis have discussions (off-forum) with JNCC in February 2008 about the issue of subgenera. In fact the subject also came up recently in the Species Dictionary (see the thread on "Alchemilla vulgaris BSBI Vascular Plants checklist"), where I replied as follows (message #7):
"Dear Graham,
Just to pick up on your observation that "...there are strange things in the formatting which means they don't match - especially the molluscs where the Genus name is repeated in brackets."
What is happening here (and in other groups, such as beetles and Hymenoptera) is that current taxonomy has assigned species to subgenera and the name in brackets is the subgenus (which may, or may not have the same name as the genus). Since the Species Dictionary tries to reflect current taxonomic opinion (at least, in the preferred lists) and to promote best practice in name citation, we include subgenera where these are given. I do appreciate that this may complicate matters for the recording community - especially when trying to import or match existing lists of records."
So that is the explanation for why there are names in brackets and why we present them that way. What I have not addressed in that message is whether we can change things to better suit the needs of Recorder users.
One issue to bear in mind is that the Species Dictionary is primarily a nomenclator, which has other users besides Recorder users, and it has to fit in with European and International initatives (Fauna Europaea, for instance includes subgenera in name citations). I have looked at a possible compromise, where subgenera would be stripped from checklists, but the names affected would still point in the Namerserver to a recommeneded name that included the subgenus. I am not entirely happy with this approach as it mis-represents the checklist and would entail a fair amount of work to make retrospective changes. Another approach is to treat this as an issue for the Recorder Team, who are at liberty to present data that are supplied to them from the Dictionary in any way that suits the needs of their users. At present the way forward is still unresolved, but it is one of the things that I shall try and clear up when I next meet with Steve Wilkinson.
Regards,
Charles Hussey
NBN Species Dictionary Project Manager (Retired!)
