Ok I am not a taxonomist but something about this bothers me - a clade of closely related species which freely interbreed is what? Sounds like you are just going to have to exchange the name species for clade, and the name subspecies for species if you wish to express that thought. It is already expressed simply with subspecies already. The relationships close, closer, closest exist no matter what we call them and at the closest level they are always going to be instances where they hard to differentiate.

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