@bobby23 why did you decide to not commit? You also made a deviation, but left no note on it. POWO now has two varieties for C. breviflorus, but the taxon has been inactivated.

I can commit the swap, but I'll have to do some research beforehand to make sure everything is lined up properly. I didn't know if there was a reason why @bobby23 had put a deviation in place, as a discussion could have occurred somewhere else that I don't know about.

Hey, @rynxs.

The buzz involving this swap got lost under my notifications. I did not make a definitive choice to not commit this swap. I just noticed there was a deviation between what we had on iNaturalist and POWO and wanted to address it. This is the primary way I use Taxon Framework Relationships for animal taxa - it is not strictly to reflect differences we "want" on iNaturalist, just ones that exist. In recent correspondence I had with another curator, it seems that is usually not how the tool is used for plant taxa on the site, but I did not know that when I added that taxon relationship. I always planned on committing this swap, and I intended to do some reading beforehand, but it went down in priority. I wanted to be careful because, in the past, when I tried to carryout taxon swaps for plant taxa this ruffled some feathers.

I wrote a message to @egordon88 which I suppose ought to live here as well:

The very short version is: The taxon swap should have reassigned Cercocarpus montanus var. paucidentatus to Cercocarpus breviflorus.

I don't know anything about Cercocarpus breviflorus var. eximius. The Flora of North America, Flora Neomexicana, and ITIS all give it as a synonym of Cercocarpus breviflorus. USDA PLANTS has it a synonym of Cercocarpus montanus var. paucidentatus. Neither Martin & Hutchins (Flora of New Mexico) nor Correll & Johnston (Manual of the Vascular Plants of Texas) mention the name. Kearney & Peebles (Arizona Flora) write:

"3. Cercocarpus breviflorus Gray. Southern Apache, Navajo, Coconino, and Yavapai counties to Cochise and Pima counties, 5,000 to 8,000 feet, common in chaparral on dry slopes and mesas, March to November. Western Texas to Arizona and Mexico.
A shrub, sometimes treelike and up to about 4.5 m (15 feet) high. Nearly typical C. breviflorus has been collected in the Chiricahua and Huachuca mountains (Cochise County) and in the Baboquivari Mountains (Pima County). Much more common in Arizona is var. eximius C. K. Schneid. (C. eximius Rydb.) which has more spreading pubescence, larger and more distinctly dentate leaves, and usually a longer hypanthium and style."

On Google Scholar, the only recent work I see is this dissertation by Vanden Heuvel, which uses a "many varieties of Cercocarpus montanus" taxonomy and indicates that Cercocarpus breviflorus var. eximius (spelled "eximus") is a synonym of Cercocarpus montanus without indicating under which variety of that species it might fall:

https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/1017/vandenheuvelbd026.pdf%3Bjsessionid%3D86B37A4A13A08850A5E7A9CBED39B126?sequence%3D2

I have to assume POWO's decision was made without the input of anyone familiar with the species. There is certainly variation in Cercocarpus breviflorus, and for all I know the recognition of Cercocarpus breviflorus var. breviflorus & Cercocarpus breviflorus var. eximius may well be sound, but I can find no one since Kearney & Peebles in 1951 who recognizes these two varieties. The discussion in Kearney & Peebles also implies that in Arizona, at least, if we do distinguish the two varieties, most of our "new" Cercocarpus breviflorus var. breviflorus is probably Cercocarpus breviflorus var. eximius.

Rather than updating based on the taxon swap, I opted to manually correct my own IDs and observations to Cercocarpus breviflorus. Whether others wish to do the same is, of course, up to them. :-)