Talk:Torreya taxifolia

POV issues in article

I'd like to point out that this article seems to have WP:COATRACK issues in that it is a "really" about the controversy over "assisted migration" of the species into the Southern Appalachians. I'd also like to point out that it is POV-biased towards the amateur ad-hoc propagation efforts while glossing over the opposition of ecologists, some of whom seem to think the amateur effort in North Carolina shouldn't even be legal.

Some more mainstream perspectives: http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/mschwartz/Website%20publications/WildEarth.pdf http://www.npr.org/2011/02/07/133565494/a-growing-risk-endangered-plants-for-sale-online http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v469/n7331/full/469465a.html?message-global=remove

The article should focus on the species with less speculating on how best to preserve it in the future, and should primarily represent the view of mainstream ecologists when discussing conservation plans. Geogene (talk) 21:45, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Eh, but now you've introduced your POV into the article without attribution. The references to "conservation biologists" (a botanical garden) actually promote the organisation, not the other way round as you've made it look. Two of the links you've provided here don't work for me, but the Nature article is very uninformed -I agree the cloned Brighamia stuff is questionable (genetic dilution) -I even wrote a huge polemic about that ages ago and talked to the Dutch company behind it (but as long as it isn't re-imported into Hawaii it's not a problem), and the problems in the 1990s regarding the Turkish bulb export and its effects on the then newly discovered Crocus mathewii are well known, but it is no longer a major issue; Turkey has largely clamped down on the trade 15 years back, and the species is now available from breeders (there are even cultivars now). The nonsense about internet sales is just dumb. There is nothing illegal about it, the authors are mistaken. Astrophytum is not taken from the wild, the seedlists you can find, with collection data, from well-known vendors such as those from Sweden, Spain, Japan or Arizona (I'll name no names) are all from hand-pollinated stock. This is actually a case in point, (almost) all cacti are CITES I, which means international sales ARE illegal, however, there is an exception for seeds. Their example of Echinacea is also questionable; there are in fact dozens of hybrids, not just one. How they compute that the fact that it is no longer in danger of extinction because it is now commonly grown should be seen as a bad thing is head-scratching. It's actually opposite of what they say, back before internet we had newsletters sent by mail from well-known collectors, and things were much more murky and better available than today, if you knew the right people. Government monitoring of internet for non-illegal sales of horticultural specimens is a really stupid suggestion. Restricting gardening to professional ecologists and botanical gardens, what the heck? The authors also don't make clear what their problem with horticulture is, potential expansion of the ranges of rare plants beyond historic ranges? So? What about wheat or apples? Cat's out of the bag. I would say the staff writers for that magazine don't known what they're talking about. Looks like they stumbled on a few websites and had an unwarranted hissy fit. You're sources also say nothing about the spread of Fusarium, that's OR.

Sorry, got a bit pissed off there by that dumb article. Can't abide stupidity masquerading under science. I will remove/revert your POV OR, cite your complaints to the magazine.Leo Breman (talk) 14:25, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Right, a few hours later, I've gone over the entire history. Looks like you're not the one who added the OR, but a recent editor "Finn.eed" two months back, these being the only edits ever made by this user. Apologies, spoke too soon. Annoying, he/she cited one reference, which doesn't absolutely corroborate anything added. Turns out another person also re-added the info, questionably cited, only for it to be deleted by the above user. Sigh. The Nature article is still bad, so I'm not adding it -one of the references you removed has better info about the controversy. I re-added the cited stuff you removed, trimmed and cited it properly. I don't take a position on the "assisted migration" controversy either way, but the point is to inform, not to obfuscate to push whatever conviction. The fact that there is an organisation doing this is noteworthy enough, if people have a problem with that they can add their reservations in a properly cited manner, instead of deleting the offending info. And what the afore-mentioned editor did, inventing stuff to bolster his/her POV, is a no-no. Cheers, Leo Breman (talk) 21:27, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

POV issues again

I put on the POV tag there are multiple issues here. Here are some of the examples but not all of them.

• The page is not a sandbox Whoever is editing should do their edits on a sandbox. Phrases such as "DRAFT PARAS:", "WILL CONTINUE ADDING CONTENT TOMORROW." or "(To be edited or deleted)". should not be added
• Weasel word: "According to one writer", "Some conservationists consider T. taxifolia as the lead candidate for assisted migration of forests in North America."
• Irrelevant facts: eg. On the section Assisted migration there is a big paragraph explaining Barlow,Schwartz, and Martin, "The initial recovery plan in 1986 gave more details on the prehistory, stating, "Torreya is a genus of four or five species from Florida and Georgia, California, China, and Japan. The present geographic distribution of the genus is similar to the distributions of several other plant genera. The distributions, together with fossil evidence, suggest that these genera had wide distributions during the Tertiary Period that were subsequently reduced by climatic changes during the Quaternary (James 1961, Delcourt and Delcourt 1975)." The article is Torreya taxifolia NOT the genus Torreya.
• Improper citations: eg. "Publications in which he was lead or coauthor include "A Framework for Debate of Assisted Migration in an Era of Climate Change" (2007), "The Precautionary Principle in Managed Relocation Is Misguided Advice" (2009), and "Multidimensional Evaluation of Managed Relocation" (2009)." This is NOT an article about Schwartz. "The most recent (2020) recovery plan update states" Just write the facts from the paper
• Opinion: "This project has proved contentious."

There are other issues too. But I am going to leave the tag there and let editors have a chance to fix it. --Cs california (talk) 06:15, 22 July 2022 (UTC)

I am an established science writer, specializing in evolutionary biology and evolutionary ecology (4 books in the 1990s, including MIT Press) with several journal papers in late 80s and early 90s. I am, however, new to wikipedia editing, so I appreciate the suggestion to use the Sandbox, and will switch to there today. As to your substantive suggestions, here is my first run at how I will deal with them:

YOUR COMMENT: Weasel word: "According to one writer", "Some conservationists consider T. taxifolia as the lead candidate for assisted migration of forests in North America."

MY RESPONSE: That entire last section was original, prior to my beginning to work on this page in 2022. I agree it was POV and not adequately referenced, so I just kept pushing it to the bottom with the notation "to be edited or deleted". But given your encouragement, I just deleted all those remaining paras, beginning with "According to one writer."

YOUR COMMENT: Irrelevant facts: eg. On the section Assisted migration there is a big paragraph explaining Barlow,Schwartz, and Martin, "The initial recovery plan in 1986 gave more details on the prehistory, stating, "Torreya is a genus of four or five species from Florida and Georgia, California, China, and Japan. The present geographic distribution of the genus is similar to the distributions of several other plant genera. The distributions, together with fossil evidence, suggest that these genera had wide distributions during the Tertiary Period that were subsequently reduced by climatic changes during the Quaternary (James 1961, Delcourt and Delcourt 1975)." The article is Torreya taxifolia NOT the genus Torreya."

MY RESPONSE: Let's encourage another several wiki editors (not just the plants people, but also the climate adaptation and conservation editors) to look at that para. Some plants become very important not just for their taxonomies but also because they enter into public issues and controversies — which should be acknowledged. In this case, that info about "Torreya genus" is crucial background for a reader to evaluate for themselves the factual basis and practical importance of what the valid conservation practices should be for "glacial relict" plants in a time of rapid climate warming. Do note that the quotation in question, "Torreya is a genus of four ..." is not POV. It is a direct quotation from the U.S. government 1986 recovery plan for Torreya taxifolia. It can thus be argued that the federal government felt this understanding of global distribution of the species within the genus was an important fact for those concerned with T. taxifolia species recovery to be aware of.

YOUR COMMENT: Improper citations: eg. "Publications in which he was lead or coauthor include "A Framework for Debate of Assisted Migration in an Era of Climate Change" (2007), "The Precautionary Principle in Managed Relocation Is Misguided Advice" (2009), and "Multidimensional Evaluation of Managed Relocation" (2009)." This is NOT an article about Schwartz. "The most recent (2020) recovery plan update states" Just write the facts from the paper

MY RESPONSE: Please take a look at the previous, 2014, POV statement: Geogene (talk) 21:45, 13 June 2014 (UTC) See there that "Schwartz" was suggested as being one of the "mainstream" scientists to include more in the wikipedia page. This is indeed what I have done in the new subsection I added titled "The role of habitat deterioration in the die-off". Even though I am the founder of Torreya Guardians and thus seemingly in opposition, there is no question that Mark Schwartz played the lead in the 1990s in attempting to discern why the species was in severe decline. Yes the species was suffering owing to one or more diseases, but was disease the ultimate cause or just the proximate cause? Schwartz (and coauthor Hermann) did an exemplary job with posing multiple hypotheses before jumping into conservation tool decisions. They even did fieldwork in California torreya habitat, but as professionals were forced to present entirely quantitative evidence (measurements) and gathered only in a very short time and in limited habitats. There is no question that Schwartz's papers and core arguments deserve major attention on this wikipedia page. Because T. taxifolia was the species that prompted the initial "assisted migration" policy explorations among conservation academics, Schwartz was not only always a lead but he was the only one who had experience with the main plant in question. Of course he deserves mention for the papers he was first author or coauthor on — and none of his colleagues would disagree with that. If an editor wants to insert someone else's paper, fine. But this page is Torreya taxifolia, not assisted migration in general, so Schwartz is indeed the lead.

ONE MORE THING, I was mentored in beginning to learn wikipedia editing by the creator/editor of the "Assisted migration of forests in North America" wikipedia page, created in 2021. I happen to have a long history in reading and excerpting and corresponding with the major academic and USFS forestry researchers in USA, Canada, and Mexico. Not only did I choose and excerpt and summarize the key papers, but I emailed many of the authors after that page was mostly done and received many expressions of thanks from them. You can see my long history of presenting both the conservation biology and the forestry scholarship by going to this webpage I created back in 2007 and continue adding to this day: http://www.torreyaguardians.org/assisted-migration.html

YOUR COMMENT: Opinion: "This project has proved contentious."

MY RESPONSE: Indeed! Because I personally am a major character in the conservation controversy aspect of Torreya taxifolia, I have to be especially alert to present the strengths of those opposing the actions of Torreya Guardians and thus I mostly use their exact quotes rather than trying to summarize their positions. With respect to the 2005 Wild Earth papers of Barlow and Martin v. Schwartz, we read each other's papers and Martin had a phone call with Schwartz to settle out remaining points where we disagreed, but could nonetheless respect the disagreements. In my view, that original oppositional paper by Schwartz well laid out the science and the then-mainstream general concerns of professionals in conservation biology regarding climate adaptation v. invasive species concerns. In contrast, both myself and Paul S. Martin had written a number of essays published in Wild Earth magazine in the 90s, and they were always pushing the wild edge of how conservation should be pursued. Seventeen years later, the conservation mainstream is shifting. Please consider that animals have always been the chief focus of endangered species management, controversy, and funding. Plants are in the backwater (as Shirey 2011 points out; BTW Patrick Shirey and I have had a lot of correspondence over the years, and I donated to him the paper copies of early T. taxifolia assisted migration correspondence, after I digitized many of them and put them online as archive via the Torreya Guardians website).

FINALLY, consider that if there is an attempt to move the "Conservation controversy" section from this wikipedia page to the "Assisted migration" page, the animal-centric parties will minimize or derail it. I was an early creator of that wikipedia page, but gave up trying to put anything into it many years ago. Indeed, the animal-centric and endangered-species foci of that page were the reasons why a separate forestry wikipedia page was created in 2021. Foresters publish in distinct journals from conservation biologists, and their primary "assisted migration" concern is not "species rescue" but "assisted population migration" and "assisted range expansion", as you will see in the "Assisted migration of forests in North America" wikipedia page — which achieved "Good" status as a wikipedia page. Thus, everyone, please keep that in mind when critically reading the Torreya taxifolia "Conservation controversy" section and its subsections. That issue can only be dealt with on this wikipedia page, and I believe it can be achieved in an objective fashion that even the oppositional parties will be grateful to see. Know that as soon as I finish this page, I will contact Mark Schwartz and ask him to contribute ideas, changes, and images. This page will be important to complete by August 8, as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service will end its comments period for its proposed regulatory change of June 2022 that will finally authorize forms of assisted migration — expressly owing to climate change making "historical range" unrecoverable. This is the first time that climate change has been brought into the regulations pertaining to implementation of the US Endangered Species Act. So, climate change wikipedia editors: Please be involved in this page so that wikipedia contributors unfamiliar with the importance of climate change issues will not inordinately delete or minimize conservation aspects of this species-specific page. Thanks!Cbarlow (talk) 13:05, 22 July 2022 (UTC)

@Cs california - It is July 23 and I want to thank you for suggesting I do my editing first in the Sandbox. Wow! I just tried that today, and it was great. I will use it henceforth when creating new sections or subsections. Cbarlow (talk) 00:06, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

Just fix it up to be the same style of other wikipedia pages look at the Wikipedia:Manual of Style page for reference. For the Irrelevant facts you can just move it to the torreya page and link it for context. You can decide if you want to move the controversy section. The big issue is here is for the POV is Conflict of interest, which is pretty clear, but I don't really care about the issue as long as it reads similar to other articles and don't stick out like a sore thumb.--Cs california (talk) 08:08, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

@Cs california - Have been completely rewriting and referencing the "Conservation Controversies" section over the past several days. Still some more to do. I might finish today. I will let you know when I think I am done, so that your can re-evaluate the POV issue. Cbarlow (talk) 10:49, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

GOOD JOB SHORTENING THE INTRO

That super-long intro really pushed down an overly (but necessarily) long Table of Contents, so your solution to move most of the paras downward was excellent! You initially put them all in as the intro paras to the CONSERVATION ACTIONS section, but I ended up moving most to become the intro of the EXTINCTION section and then put one (about controversy) down as the intro to the CONSERVATION CONTROVERSIES section. I think it is all much, much better now. So thank you for doing the work of finding a way to shorten the intro without losing content. Cbarlow (talk) 10:49, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion:

• Apalachicola River FL satellite view Google Maps.jpg

You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 16:21, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion:

• Torreya taxifolia historic groves videos by Torreya Guardians.jpg

You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 13:08, 27 July 2022 (UTC)

TASK COMPLETED BY CBARLOW Cbarlow (talk) 21:47, 27 July 2022 (UTC) I just sent an email to permission-commons@wikimedia.org from the same email address I use for my youtube channel, ghostsofevolution, from which I captured thumbnails or internal slides and then uploaded to wikimedia commons, for use in my editing of the Torreya taxifolia wikipedia page. See my Username file to see the webpage where my bio and publications are listed, which includes the youtube channel. Cbarlow (talk) 21:47, 27 July 2022 (UTC)

Mailer-Demon said the email address doesn't work:

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for the domain wikimedia.org.)

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From: Connie Barlow <conniebarlow52@gmail.com>

Subject: CBarlow on wikipedia is ghostsofevolution youtube channel

Date: July 27, 2022 at 5:42:31 PM EDT

To: permission-commons@wikimedia.org

My wikipedia name, CBarlow applies to me: Connie Barlow. This email address is the same that I use for my youtube channel ghosts of evolution.

So the thumbnails or slide grabs I attribute to various of my youtube vids on ghostsofevolution channel are valid for me to upload as images to wikimedia commons. Cbarlow (talk) 22:31, 27 July 2022 (UTC)

TASK COMPLETED BY CBARLOW Cbarlow (talk) 21:47, 27 July 2022 (UTC) I just sent an email to permission-commons@wikimedia.org from the same email address I use for my youtube channel, ghostsofevolution, from which I captured thumbnails or internal slides and then uploaded to wikimedia commons, for use in my editing of the Torreya taxifolia wikipedia page. See my Username file to see the webpage where my bio and publications are listed, which includes the youtube channel. Cbarlow (talk) 21:47, 27 July 2022 (UTC)