Species_subspecies nomanclature in 10.8.1

If this is a bulk import report, send the spreadsheet to services@wildme.org with the email subject line matching your bug report

In which Wildbook did the issue occur? GiraffeSpotter

What operating system were you using? (eg. MacOS 10.15.3) Windows

What web browser were you using? (eg. Chrome 79) Chrome

What is your role on the site? (admin, researcher, etc) admin

What happened? With new new 10.8.1 update we are seeing some inconsistency with the way the species_subpecies (Encounter.specificEpithet) is required/recognised. The new bulk import table requires the species_subspecies with an underscore separator (it used to be a space only). This is fine, but on corrected upon import, if annotation needs to be added manually, the species is not recognised despite displayed correctly with underscore in the encounter. We must re-assign the species in the encounter in order to add manual annotation.
This has been flagged by a couple of different users.

What did you expect to happen? Consistently recognise the species_subspecies naming. Perhaps in some part of the code a space is still encoded rather than an underscore? I’m happy either way, just need one for consistency.

What are some steps we could take to reproduce the issue?

Screenshot 2025-09-23 101419

you can see with this encounter Wildbook for Giraffe
Species_species correct in encounter, if you try to add new annotation not able to without altering species again

Thanks for flagging this! I’ll share with the devs and follow up as soon as I have an update for you.

This is going to take another day or so to correct since it involves additional standardization updates for how subspecies is handled in GiraffeSpotter.

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Thanks for your patience! The conflicts have been fixed and you should be able to manually annotate now.

Bulk import may now flag an underscore in the subspecies as an error, although if it doesn’t, the backend will save it correctly even if there is an underscore. We’ve also fixed existing encounter records so that the taxonomy format is standardized across subspecies without the underscore.