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.

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Thanks for fixing this @Anastasia.

I did 2x bulk imports today for Giraffa tippelskirchi tippelskirchi and, although the bulk import table correctly recognised the species name from the xlsx, the encounters have been saved as only Giraffa tippelskirchi. This distinction of subspecies if really important for us - please can you (1) check if this is a bug because of the duplicated word and (2) alter species for all the encounters under these 2x imports?

image

image

https://giraffespotter.org/react/bulk-import-task?id=5d502a65-4b20-4882-9e45-4686e9966759

https://giraffespotter.org/react/bulk-import-task?id=70c7cb57-52c3-4155-b375-2bbfd0a86c42

Thank you for letting us know! The devs are working on this today. If you know of other bulk imports that are dropping the 3rd part of the taxonomy, can you link them here so we can correct them?

Oh, and can you send me these spreadsheets as well?

Quick update: we have a fix in place, but we need a list of imports and required species to quickly fix

@CourtneyMarne Just following up to see if there were additional bulk imports you needed us to correct the taxonomy for

Thanks very much @Anastasia - sorry for my late reply.

Please can you correct the below imports/subspecies

Giraffa tippelskirchi tippelskirchi for the following
Import Task: 952d3974-235d-4585-bf49-c5924da207d7
Import Task: 6a9fc6f6-cc67-4780-a4ca-425b406e0ece
Import Task: 77adb2b0-d2e8-4769-880f-7283929cf71d
Import Task: 0d1258a9-f8c5-4826-9bd4-7859d704630b
Import Task: 1ef0ae86-d7ce-4d0f-ad2a-faf8cdc1b1d6
Import Task: 82bd2822-c3d3-4819-afe0-44a6f1b6cd2f

Giraffa camelopardalis camelopardalis for the following
Import Task: 725d561a-71c8-4c71-8c9b-e24fb22bc760
Import Task: 1ac1be7d-4ec0-4633-a842-b54edc7fd796
Import Task: 54d5c64f-1e76-418e-ac3c-6a1e93c9db9c
Import Task: b162810e-1c43-48c5-870a-e775485a60c7
Import Task: 56507a2a-ca26-4ecb-a151-aee279a4d3f2
Import Task: 0dcacdcb-acb7-4437-9c55-ecc8a999c7b7
Import Task: aab74c97-1bae-4995-b943-9bf8ce59c068

Thank you!
Court

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These have all been updated! Feel free to re-run matches on any unidentified encounters.

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