Upcoming IOC World List Updates: Red-rumped Swallows and Buff-bellied Pipits

v14.2 of the IOC World List is due to be issued very soon, and as usual will give us lots of work to apply to BUBO Listing! The most time-consuming aspect is including any split species on each of the country lists we support, as this level of distribution detail is not published by IOC themselves. We would appreciate some help! If anyone would like to work out the list of countries that the following major splits should apply to, then please This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.!

• European Red-rumped Swallow Cecropis rufula, Eastern Red-rumped Swallow C. daurica, African Red-Rumped Swallow C. melanocrissus
• Siberian Pipit Anthus japonicus, American Pipit A. rubescens

The other splits generally affect a small range and will be easier for us to work out!

So, am I correct in understanding that each list is its own entity? Even if it follows IOC-taxonomy you have to manually maintain and update each country list if that list does not have a special/separate moderator? Holy cow, what a work. 
If you still need help with this topic, let me know. As it seems we are still transitioning to 14.2? Perhaps best to get straight into 15.1. 😎

Not quite. Each list that is based on the same taxonomy gets updated when we update the base list (IOC and Clements mainly, but some other authorities (e.g. SACC) adopt a change first), so splits and lumps are automatic that way. However, when IOC (or Clements) publish an update they don't publish country lists, so we have to work out each country that a new species arising from a split occurs in. So splitting a widespread species such as Red-rumped Swallow involves us having to work out which individual countries (lots!) to add the new European, African and Eastern Red-rumpeds. This is time-consuming and never going to be perfectly accurate, so it is helpful to have people looking after individual countries for us to correct any mistakes. Most of the less popular countries don't have regular users, so there will undoubtedly be several errors, but easy for us to correct when we are aware of them.

15.1 coming soon...