Redpoll taxonomy changes and BTO surveys
17 Feb 2025
When it comes to taxonomy, BTO follows the British Ornithologists’ Union (BOU) and, in turn, the International Ornithological Committee (IOC). We aim to implement relevant taxonomic changes twice a year, in keeping with the updates published by the IOC.
Most of the time, our members and volunteers will probably be unaware of the changes being made, because they do not impact what you see on the front end of our systems. This time around, however, there is a particularly obvious change. The three redpoll species formerly recognised by the IOC have been lumped under a single taxon.
The relevant IOC recommendation is to: “treat all of the redpoll taxa as conspecific with the English name 'Redpoll'; following Chesser et al. (2024) based on genomic homogeneity, continuous phenotypic variation, overlapping habitat, and lack of evidence of prolonged isolation (Mason & Taylor 2015, Funk et al. 2021).”
BTO has now implemented this change in our database, which will be reflected across all of our surveys and schemes. For clarity, there will now be a single species, known as Redpoll Acanthis flammea. This will have the five-letter code of ‘REDPO’ and the two-letter code of ‘RD’.
In relevant schemes, observers can still opt to submit Redpoll records with “subspecies” information, such as Redpoll (Lesser – cabaret) which retain their former codes (in this case, ‘LESRE’ and ‘LR’) and we will use these accordingly for each scheme.
Any existing records submitted to BTO schemes will retain any "subspecific" attributes they were submitted with. So if someone submitted a "Lesser Redpoll", that will still be in their records as Redpoll (Lesser - cabaret). How these records are presented back to the user, either as individual records or as summary statistics, will depend on the scheme involved. Individual schemes will communicate this through their regular communications to participants.
Share this page