(193) Proposal to democratize aspects of the governance of the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants

Abstract

Prior to the 2011 Melbourne Congress, the late esteemednomenclaturalist Gillian Perry (in Taxon 59: 1915–1916. 2010) dis-covered a previously overlooked issue threatening the perceivedhomotypy of some 30 names with conserved types and their basio-nyms then listed in Appendices III and IV of theVienna Code(McNeill & al. in Regnum Veg. 146. 2006). At that time, it may havesimply been assumed that the basionym of a conserved name was au-tomatically homotypic with the conserved name. But for this toremain true when the conserved name was explicitly conserved witha conserved type, the basionym would have to be explicitly conservedsimilarly. Because 28 of the 30 cases Perry (l.c.) mentioned involvedbasionyms that applied to subdivisions of genera (App. III) or infra-specific taxa (App. IV), which lacked any provision for their conser-vation under theVienna Code, she submitted Proposal 243 to remedythis situation, which upon its approval in Melbourne gave rise to mostof the final sentence of current Art. 14.1 (“The name of a subdivisionof a genus or of an infraspecific taxon may be conserved with a con-served type and listed in App. III and IV, respectively, when it is thebasionymor replaced synonymof a name of a genus or species thatcould not continue to be used in its current sense without conserva-tion”; Turland & al. in Regnum Veg. 159. 2018). The bolded textwas added to this Article with acceptance of Proposal 234 (Wiersema& al. in Taxon 65: 642–646. 2016) at the Shenzhen Congress.Perry astutely recognized that while acceptance of her Proposal243 would provide a future mechanism for ensuring correspon-dence between listed types of names with conserved types in App.III and IV and those of their basionyms, when thesecould then beexplicitly conserved as such, it could not address the already exist-ing incongruency of types resulting from strict application of thenArt. 14, where the listed basionyms (at the same rank) had not been.