Deliberations

The deliberations of the AviList team are fully available to the public. This is a critical element of the AviList commitment to transparency of its processes and deliberations.

AviList deliberations (GitHub)

• Taxonomic deliberations (v2025)
• Nomenclatural deliberations (v2025)

Future versions (e.g., v2026, coming soon) will have those deliberations added to this page

These pages reside in GitHub, which is our internal system that helps keep a record of all of the AviList votes and deliberations. This provides a permanent archive of AviList proposals, discussions, and deliberations. These pages fulfill these critically important goals that are their main purposes:

• to exactly reflect the discussions and deliberations that were part of each taxonomic decision;
• to retain the numerical keys to the taxonomy version (2025) and issue number, so that issue 2025-1171 can be referenced to understand more about the split of Lava Heron (Butorides sundevalli) from Striated Heron (B. striata), along with the further split of Little Heron (B. atricapilla).
• to interface with the internal system for voting and deliberation which has also been developed in GitHub.
• to allow removal of documents for which we do not own the copyright, but which may have been used internally for deliberations (e.g., PDFs of preprints or articles).

Each issue that was considered is clearly referenced in the downloadable checklist and also in the CheckList Explorer by the Proposal Number. Each Proposal Number that involved a specific treatment on the final checklist also includes a Decision Summary, and for anything with a Proposal Number and a Decision Summary, there will be accompanying deliberations. To find the Lava Heron deliberations, simply go to the Taxonomic deliberations (v2025), find issue 2025-1171 (shown in purple box in the below image from the Checklist Explorer), and you can see the original deliberations that supported the recognition of that taxon at the species level.

The deliberations each have labels, which provide a quick view of the primary issue being considered. Species limits and Genera are two of the commonest labels. Note that some issues that assess Species limits might also combine assessment of Subspecies, and there are some cases where more than one label could apply.

These deliberations are very much modeled on those of the North American Classification Committee and the South American Classification Committee, who both have set high standards for transparency with their public proposal processes and open sharing of the deliberations and comments from members.