Merge Taxa dialog

This dialog enables you to merge two or more taxon names. This is equivalent to reassigning all occurrences of one species (the donor) to another species (the target), and then deleting the donor species. You will usually want to do this if there are spelling variants in a name or if you wish to merge two objective synonyms rather than set up a synonymy for them. About synonymy...

Note that it is also possible to reassign occurrences of a taxon to another taxon (which affects one well only), via the Samples menu in Samples & Interpretations, which may be preferable to merging taxa (which affects the entire database).

In the Taxanomic Database module, selected all of the taxa you wish to merge in the Taxa window, then press Taxon | Merge. The table shows all the species you selected, with with the number of database occurrences of ecah. Select the species you wish to keep, and press Set Target.

If some donor species represent occurence types (Rw, Cv, ?) or sub-types of the the target species, you can select from the drop-down menu in the last column of the table. In the example below, occurrences of 'Ricciisporites tuberculatus fragments' (the donor species) will be updated to occurrences of 'Ricciisporites tuberculatus' (the target species), with their sub-type set to 'fragments'. Note that if some occurrences of the donor species already have other sub-types set, you cannot update the sub-type.
NOTE: You can only plot sub-types separatly in the v2 charts. In the legacy Charts module, sub-types will be aggregated. Consider this before you go ahead with the merge, which is irreversible.

If there are occurrences of both of the merged taxa in any samples, you will see the Merge Occurrences dialog. This gives you a final chance to check that you want to make the merge. If you press Cancel at this stage, the merge will not take place.

Merging events

Bear the following in mind if you merge taxa which are linked to events:

If the taxon you are removing is linked to events whose name is identical to their linked taxon's name, then these events will be merged with the 'use as top or base' event linked to the taxon you are keeping. If the taxon you are keeping has no 'use as top or base' event, the original event (linked to the removed taxon) will be renamed to reflect the new taxon name. You will be warned that this has happened.
Events will not be merged if the event names are different from their linked taxon names (e.g. 'Ammodiscus cretaceous EVENT 5' will not be merged). You should deal with these events yourself using the Merge Events dialog (from the Events menu). You will be prompted if you need to do this.

Page last updated: 01-Dec-2014 16:43