Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Scythebill 10.4 - IOC 4.2 support!

Scythebill 10.4 is now available!  Download it here, and please follow Scythebill on Google+ or Facebook for updates.

Scythebill 10.4 includes the IOC 4.2 checklist and a few small tweaks and bug fixes.


IOC 4.2 list support


The IOC World Bird List version 4.2 was released last week, and is now available in Scythebill.  If you're wondering what's been split or lumped, you can see here.  Gory details follow...

Scythebill makes some modest additions to the IOC list to support interoperability with Clements/eBird - in particular, to support a number of the species described by Handbook of Birds of the World.  Those additions were also made in Scythebill's IOC 4.1, but a number have now been demoted to subspecies status to align with SACC decisions (or an apparent trend in such decisions):
  • "Western Puffbird" is demoted to ssp. obamai of Striolated Puffbird.
  • "Xingu Woodcreeper" is demoted to ssp. retentus of Amazonian Barred Woodcreeper.
  • "Tupana" and "Tapajós" Scythebills are demoted to ssps gyldenstopei and cardosoi of Curve-billed Scythebill
  • "Bamboo Antwren" is demoted to ssp. oreni of Ihering's Antwren.
The following HBW descriptions are retained as full species pending a clearer resolution within SACC and IOC:
  • Inambari Woodcreeper
  • Roosevelt Antwren
  • Sucunduri Flatbill
  • Campina Jay
  • Inambari Gnatcatcher 
In addition, I've preemptively added Tropeiro Seedeater to the Clements/eBird taxonomy (and the Brazil checklist), as this newly described species in IOC 4.2 will almost certainly be added in the next revision of Clements/eBird.


Other bug fixes

A couple of small issues in Browse by location were resolved - a particularly dangerous one allowed users to inadvertently add "sightings" of families, which led to a variety of problems.

Small checklist improvements were made to Serbia, Spain, and Brunei.



As always, please let me know if you have any problems, either on Google+, Facebook, or by email.