There is not, however, such an option on iNaturalist, so unless someone requests such a feature and gets it approved/implemented, we have to work with the system we have.
There was a “non-established” annotation added for amphibians that was intended in part to try to address some of these tensions, but as far as I know it doesn’t affect distribution maps/sharing with other databases. My understanding is that this annotation was meant as a pilot to see how it worked out and would potentially be extended to other taxa if it proved useful. It would be interesting to know whether anything is currently happening with this.
That said, I’m not sure having an “escaped” or “waif” category would really solve these recurring debates. I suspect it would merely shift them. In a lot of cases, it is not going to be clear whether a particular individual is an escapee/waif/vagrant or naturalized, because this requires knowing how it got there and whether it is reproducing. In many cases we don’t have enough information to assess this – an escapee or hitchhiker may become a naturalizing population at any time given the right conditions. Maybe the escaped tropical butterfly will not (absence of food plant, cold climate etc.) but many escaped individuals have less narrow requirements and merely require a seed landing in the right place or a second individual of the same species to found a population.
Thanks, I will be following that one also because I see it got shifting to the same discussion as here. Sorry for the overhead, but no need for double replies
A few years ago, serious consideration was given to adding some extra features to deal with escapees, and an iNaturalist staff member started a long discussion about it here:
Unfortunately, the OP (Scott Loarie) never followed up with any concrete conclusions, and a quick skim through the replies didn’t reveal any obvious official pronouncement about whether any of the proposed solutions had been categorically ruled out.
Perhaps it would be helpful if a staff member did that now so there’s a canonical forum post to point to whenever this topic comes up again.
One extra feature was added, the established annotation. I don’t think it’s fair to say that they never followed up with any concrete conclusions, since the annotation was implemented:
Considering the fact that 2 out of 6 (at this time) “captive” votes are coming from curators, if I flag the observation, there is a real chance that the curator who will handle the flag is not a supporter of the rule that escapees are wild… just saying as a fun fact… The community of users opposing the site rules is quite strong so this matter should be given some consideration, even if I do agree there is no easy solution.
AFAICS, there are no conclusions presented in the forum thread itself regarding the various proposals outlined in the OP. (The blog post was published two years after the forum discussion ended).
And given that it’s a pilot feature only available for amphibians and reptiles. Also, there are numerous comments on the blog post suggesting widespread misuse of the feature - but that was over a year ago, so it’s not obvious what conclusions should be drawn from any of this at the moment.
