I found a captive plant from a extremely endangered but also microendemic plant, which is way to far from its origin, anyway, this plant in this new area recently flowered and got seedling, with several new plants… are these tiny plant captive or wild/Research Grade
Observation in question https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/123170741
The seedlings are Wild for iNat. iNat maps observations, which may, or may not, reflect the natural distribution. You have context – this is Wild.
The way I see it:
F1: ‘captive/cultivated’ (in the iNat sense) if planted/sown/placed “here” deliberately
F2: ‘wild’ (in the iNat sense) if spreading/reproducing beyond that place unintentionally
“Here” being defined as the “intended place”, i.e. the flowerbed where you planted some bulbs last spring, your front lawn where you recently sowed new grass, the terracotta pot of your favorite cactus. Bulbils/seeds/cuttings can easily escape that place (carried away by wind, ants, gravity…) and germinate/take root elsewhere. Escapees = “wild” as per guidelines.
If the parent plant was planted intentionally in a garden-like area, I don’t think these would be wild, as they wouldn’t be
“garden plant that is reproducing on its own and spreading outside of the intended gardening area”
If the parent plant just happens to be there, it’s origin can’t be inferred/is unknown, and this isn’t a gardening area, it’s probably best as “wild”, see:
However, the above sited sentence "a garden plant that is reproducing on its own and spreading outside of the intended gardening area” is only a listed example of a wild organism, not a requirement or guideline. So, just because it is not spreading outside of the “intended gardening area” (however that is interpreted to be meant) does not preclude it being wild.
Do you have a second obs for the planted parent ? Then you could mark that one as Cultivated, and link the 2 obs.
I would argue yes, it does. The second half of the sentence is not an afterthought or merely exemplary, but a key part of the definition of what makes a plant wild or not.
If the assumption is that the person who planted the original plant intended it to establish itself in the gardening area, then subsequent generations are also captive – they got there and were permitted to stay there because this is what humans intended. In an actively managed gardening area (as opposed to offspring of plants sown or planted as part of a restoration/renaturalization effort), the plants are receiving care and people are actively choosing whether they will be permitted to remain or not.
That same page also lists “the descendents of plants that had been planted by humans” as among the examples of a wild organism. This would seem to include all second generation plants, regardless of if they are outside the gardening area or not.
One could argue though that planting an annual and letting it go to seed so it drops seeds in your garden for you to grow next year is still a form of “human-planted”. If second generation plants in a garden are automatically wild, then I could submit entire herb gardens as wild plants, as stuff like parsley and dill and coriander will self-seed at the end of each season to produce next year’s crop. The gardener is still caring for the plants and intended them to be there, and even made the decision to let the old plants there long enough to go to seed. I see a difference between this case and a case of “there’s a dill plant growing in the chicken coop because some seeds blew over there and escaped last year”. (Which is, in fact, how I got my only wild observation of dill: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/297355156 )
Also if “a garden plant that is reproducing on its own” (ie second generation) was automatically wild, then the phrase “and spreading outside of the intended gardening area” would be completely superfluous. It seems odd that that phrase would even be there if there weren’t at least some significance to the spreading being relevant.
Neither of the mentioned examples are requirements for an observation to be wild, only clear examples. They aren’t contradictory at all. That page also doesn’t mean they flies that aren’t on zebras in zoos are not wild.
I think “spreading outside the intended gardening area” is meant as a requirement for offspring of garden plants to be considered wild.
It goes without saying that completely wild native plants not descended from anything planted by humans are also wild.
The fly on a zebra example is saying the fly is wild because it got there on it’s own, even though it was attracted to the captive zebra brought there by humans.
It goes without saying that flies in a totally wild setting are also wild.
Clear examples of things that could seem like edge cases are used to mean “here is where the line is drawn” not “anything goes.”
We can infer from it that the fly on the giraffe at the zoo is also wild, and a fly on one’s riding horse is also wild.
We can’t start calling flies raised in a laboratory wild just because they weren’t specifically named as an example of captive, and hey, if the one on the zebra at the zoo was wild. . .
There are gray areas with self-seeded plants, but I don’t think a seedling sprouting directly below the parent plant in the same maintained garden bed is one of them. The example of what it takes for descendants of cultivated plants to become wild specified spreading outside the intended gardening area.