Will Molecular Phylogenetics Help Decrease Nomenclatural Instability?

In the process of compiling a flora for Montana (Lesica 2012, 2022), we came to realize that many published nomenclatural changes are only weakly supported by the data presented which has often been based on recent findings in the field of molecular evolution. In this essay we attempt to present a summary of the reasons why taxonomic changes may be less than robust and our guidelines for accepting newly proposed nomenclature that we attempted to follow in our work. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.