@loarie?

Correct: R. monoceros replaces R. pusillus in Taiwan.

@jakob do you know which species lives on the Ryukyu Islands and Japan?

It's a bit irritating that this swap is being shown on top of the species page at www.inaturalist.org/taxa/785254-Rhinolophus-monoceros. Is there any possibility to remove this alert apart from deleting this taxon change?

Based on @jakob's recommendation and my own digging, my preference would be to rely on the American Museum of Natural History's Bats of the World as arbiter for valid and curated bat taxonomy.

@bobby23 I agree there may be some major sources that can often be used. But, no single sources are typically updated/complete enough, fast enough. Examples:

Issues w/ IUCN were mentioned here.

I created a curation request to add R. affinis subspecies (See: Mao et al. 2010. Peistocene climatic cycling drives intra-specific diversification in the intermediate horseshoe bat in Southern China). These seemingly aren't listed by the AMNH source, 10 years later. Neither are many others, some of which are valid and listed on sources e.g. GBIF (yet GBIF also lists some incorrect ones, so must be evaluated case by case).

So, articles should be used as sources too, when most updated. The only caveat is if a given article were disagreed upon in the literature, unreliable (e.g. made other errors), or proposed very uncertain taxon changes. Anyway, if someone cites an article for a taxon change, if others here disagree then a discussion can simply be had like this. In my view a proposed change, should cite evidence when it seems uncertain or people disagree (disagreement should use sources too).

To clarify, I'm not saying to approve the current taxon change. For example, Wu et al. 2012 took a slightly different view. I'd need to review more papers to know (Wu open up additional taxa revision questions too). I'm just giving my view of what would be required to demonstrate evidence for or against any given change. I'd be fine if this request was closed.