Use cases: Name harvesting
Taxonomic treatment of Samydeae
In preparation for a taxonomic treatment of the Tribe Samydeae (Salicaceae), which includes a complete checklist of names, the authors need to know about names that may be missing in their current treatment.
Current procedure: Currently, the only way to identify additional names (and, at the same time, potentially erroneous names in the aggregator database) is to completely download the taxonomic group in question, match the local list with the downloaded list and see what is left unmatched. Simple-to-use tools to do so locally are not known, so either manual matching using spreadsheets etc. or home-made routines in a database system are be used to achieve that. Another caveat is that aggregators like Catalogue of Life or World Flora Online Plantlist for good reasons do not included intermediate taxonomic levels, such as (in this case) the tribe within the family. Users thus have to download the entire family and manually sort out the taxa not belonging to the group of interest, or go genus-by-genus doing several downloads.
Wish-list: A name harvesting procedure as an add-on to name matching that allows to download names in the aggregator database that have not been matched and that belong to a certain user-defined taxonomic group. The taxonomic group may be everything contained within a single node in the taxonomic hierarchy (e.g. a family) or a collection of nodes (e.g. a list of genera). In the latter case, the user should also be able to define if names of species or infraspecies that carry the generic name should be included even if they are treated as synonyms of a different (not included) taxonomic group.
