How to do a lump

There are rather few lumps this year!

This page summarizes the general techniques for performing a taxonomic lump in Avisys. There are two kinds of lump; one where a species is lumped into an existing species, and one where two or more species are lumped into an entirely new species. We'll use the lump of Macquarie Parakeet into Red-crowned Parakeet as an example of the first kind of lump, and the lump of Hoary Redpoll and Common Redpoll into Redpoll as an example of the second kind of lump.

Of course, you don't need to do anything at all if you have no sightings of the lumped species, so we'll assume here that you have sightings of Macquarie Parakeet and one or both of Hoary Redpoll or Common Redpoll.

Preparation: before you run the taxonomy update

First, you need to move all of your sightings of the lumped species to the species that will exist after the taxonomy update. For Macquarie Parakeet, first click on Red-crowned Parakeet to highlight its name, then either press Ctrl-F3, or equivalently click Utilities->Save Species for Edit. Either way, this will bring up a "Saved Species" dialog listing Red-crowned Parakeet. Just click OK here. Then do a List Records of all of your sightings of Macquarie Parakeet. Click on the first sighting, then on Edit, then on Species, then on Red-crowned Parakeet, and finally on OK and Finished. You've now moved this sighting from Macquarie Parakeet to Red-crowned Parakeet. If you have a second sighting, highlight it and press enter, and then choose Yes for the question "Do you want to do mass modifys?", and then simply press enter on each subsequent sighting to perform the rename.

If you have sightings of them, you can do a corresponding procedure for each of Hoary Redpoll and Common Redpoll; however because these are going to a new species instead of an existing species, you can take a shortcut of just renaming the first species. For example, if you have seen Common Redpoll you can simply rename that species to Redpoll. To rename a species, highlight its name (by clicking on it), click on Edit->Edit Species/Family Name, change the name, and click OK. If you have seen only one of the species, you are then done. If you have seen both Hoary Redpoll and Common Redpoll, after renaming one of the species you will need to move sightings of the other species to Redpoll using the same procedure as described above for Macquarie Parakeet, i.e., do a List Records of all of your sightings of Hoary Redpoll. Click on the first sighting, then on Edit, then on Species, then on Redpoll, and finally on OK and Finished. You've now moved this sighting from Hoary Redpoll to Redpoll. Repeat for each sighting.

Run the taxonomy update

How to do this is described here.

After the taxonomy update

For lumps, there is nothing more to do after running the taxonomic update.