Trouble with these taxon swaps is that all the southern African Nephila spp have been moved to Trichonephila, but this leaves all our obs ID'd only to genus level at Nephila, which is now incorrect. So can those obs be moved to Trichonephila or do we have to do it on an obs by obs basis? @tonyrebelo @robertarcher397 @wynand_uys @cmcheatle
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?verifiable=true&taxon_id=49758&place_id=113055&preferred_place_id=113055&locale=en

Here is the paper: https://academic.oup.com/sysbio/article/68/4/555/5229942

Our phylogeny has aided the resolution of past taxonomic and classification controversies by recognizing seven contemporary genera (Clitaetra, Herennia, Indoetra, Nephila, Nephilengys, Nephilingis, and Trichonephila) within the family Nephilidae (Table 1), which also contains the fossil genera not placed phylogenetically (the Cretaceous Geratonephila, and the Tertiary Palaeonephila). Wheeler et al. (2017) and Dimitrov et al. (2017) treated Nephilinae as a subfamily of Araneidae with no explanation and based on poorly resolved phylogenies using a limited sampling of genes generally considered to be inappropriate for deep evolutionary inference. We argue that phylogenetic topological results, as well as lineage age, suggest, objectively, that Araneidae, Nephilidae, and Phonognathidae are comparably composed and phylogenetically positioned with respect to other spider families, and should be maintained as independent entities.

There is no pattern in the species moved from a geography perspective. Because there are members left in the original level atlasing it unfortunately was not an option because the switches then had to be run one at a time.

There appears to be at least 1 species that stayed in Nephilia which is present in Africa. Please note N. clavipes moves, but has not been processed yet due to the sheer volume of records.

The Trichonephila genus is not under just spiders, but the Orbweaver family. While the paper appears to propose a new family (a very quick check on my part, it is a national holiday weekend here so I am away and seeing this on my mobile), as of now the World Spider Catalog has not accepted this new family. So for alignment purposes, I have left it in its original placement for now.

I moved it, but please note according to the systematics laid out in the paper, this is incorrect as they place the genus into a newly proposed family which has not been recognized by the World Spider Catalog. If the Wsc rejected the new family or simply has not reviewed this yet, i have no way of telling.