Are the standards of what is considered cultivated different from captive?

General
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I recently had a thought about plants that I cannot get off my mind of how certain situations for plants are recognized when it comes to whether or not they are considered cultivated or not. I don’t know if this has been discussed before, but I want to make sure it does, I feel like it’s pretty important. To begin, the cultivation aspect, as I understand it, is the planting, or cultivation, of plants, which would basically mean that if there was human interference for how that plant got to the location it is at, it’s cultivated. Right? Easy to understand, but here’s where it gets interesting for me.

Yesterday, I was driving on Washington State Highway 20, starting from Tonasket to Kettle Falls. During that drive, the highway will go through some mountains that are in the Colville National Forest, and I found a really interesting location on that drive. At the Sherman Pass Campground, there are signs there (sadly I didn’t take photos of them for context for everyone here, it was an afterthought) that described the 1924 (I think) and 1988 forest fires that occurred in that area. There was information on one of those signs that talked about forest restoration, which got me thinking. Would the trees that got planted by the Forest Service be considered cultivated in accordance to iNat’s standards? But there’s a larger, underlying issue. How are you going to know which trees are cultivated? Which ones grew back naturally? Is it really a fair consideration to consider some cultivated but others not, when in reality there is no way anybody is going to know 100% which ones are and aren’t.

There’s another part to this to add on, in U.S. states that have a large timber industry, they often harvest trees from the National Forests, and because of laws that these timber companies must follow, there is reforestation, or replanting, of trees. We gain the same issue, how do you know which ones are cultivated, and will they be considered cultivated with iNat’s standards?

Another consideration I’d like everybody to give thoughts on, is the standard of “feral” plants, and to put this in relation with captive animals for what I’m specifically asking, is this: observations of captive animals on iNat that become feral, when it is observed, if it was in a state of being feral, it’s feral, and is considered research grade. This idea of how this would work is partly in inspiration of this boa constrictors observation in Texas, https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/4910798. Does the same apply to cultivated plants? If the only interference is the planting itself, and it survives for a decade without any help, it would be “wild”, would it not? I think understanding the boundaries of this is important.

It’s not only the reforestation of trees that this would apply to. The Forest Service can do replanting of any type of plant, but it’s the case of if you know, you know. If you don’t, then how would we handle this?

To summarize, do we consider cultivated plants in their native ranges and habitats as wild? Do we mark them as cultivated or not? How do we determine which individuals are even cultivated or not?

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This has been discussed heavily on the forum. Lots of different thoughts and views on it. It’s most definitely as complicated as you imply it is.

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This is easy to answer. Cultivated plants on iNaturalist should be marked as cultivated, period. It doesn’t matter if they are native or not.

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Many threads discussing almost this exact thing. To name just a handful:

Cultivated when on restored site?
Casual vs. Restorative
Are restored ecosystems wild or cultivated?
When is a plant no longer considered “cultivated?”

So if you know it’s cultivated (regardless of it’s native status or the length of time it’s been surviving), it should be marked as such. Otherwise, don’t loose sleep over it.

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If you are not sure you can always tag your observations somehow or add a comment. For every observation it is true: the more information the better…it just depends how much time you have ;)

Regarding “feral plants” I do like to look for “garden escapists” in my city, which I tag as such - they are species that later (with climate change) might also be candidates for species that establish at some point, so I think it is quite interesting to observe these.

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“Would the trees that got planted by the Forest Service be considered cultivated in accordance to iNat’s standards?”
Yes.

“How are you going to know which trees are cultivated?”
Sometimes, you can’t tell. You just have to use your best judgment.

" Another consideration I’d like everybody to give thoughts on, is the standard of “feral” plants, and to put this in relation with captive animals for what I’m specifically asking, is this: observations of captive animals on iNat that become feral, when it is observed , if it was in a state of being feral, it’s feral, and is considered research grade. This idea of how this would work is partly in inspiration of this boa constrictors observation in Texas, https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/4910798 . Does the same apply to cultivated plants? If the only interference is the planting itself, and it survives for a decade without any help, it would be “wild”, would it not? I think understanding the boundaries of this is important."
The the plant was planted, it’s cultivated, no matter what land use changes have happened around it. If it came up on its own, it’s wild, even if the seeding came from a cultivated individual.

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The problem with the general advice of “just do your best” is that even ignoring the edge cases, most users have absolutely no idea which plants may or may not be cultivated, and most don’t really care either. This includes beginners but importantly it includes many of the most prolific observers, identifiers, curators, and even admins. Many of these users simply mark an observation cultivated on the basis of the current ID and expected range and move on. This leads to thousands and thousands of observations that are erroneously marked cultivated and then become invisible. And of course we’re all aware of the flip side where many observations that are clearly cultivated are never marked as such, even years after they’ve been uploaded, making geographic information on where species occur very messy.

The biggest fix to this would be abandoning the backwards policy that observations of cultivated organisms don’t have any scientific value and deserve to be made invisible in the trash heap of casual grade. Once observations are erroneously marked cultivated, they have little hope of seeing the light of day again in the current system.

A second needed fix is asking observers and especially IDers to affirmatively mark observations as wild, and using those for range maps instead of assuming wild when no input has been entered. Neutral observations should require curation before reaching research grade. We already do this for identification, and since cultivation status has a large importance in research, I think it would be wise to implement this for that aspect as well.

To make this work well, it might be best to include the captive/cultivated marker in the ID rather than DQA at the bottom. This would also have the benefit of notifying a user when the status is changed. This can be helpful because sometimes discussion is needed to determine the correct status, and because data vandals can go in and hide observations from ever being seen and the observer can have no idea. I’ve sometimes had what I believed to be interesting wild observations marked cultivated for years before I noticed because there is no notification.

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Technically, trees that were planted, e.g. after logging or fires, as cultivated. Same for grasses planted on the roadside. However, we generally don’t know which individuals were planted and which weren’t. Therefore, I tend to mark them all wild unless it’s really clear to me that they’re not. Opinions may vary.

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GBIF doesn’t want them, so there must be some label to keep them separate. Scientists can view all records on iNat if they want.

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I think labeling them is helpful, as I outlined in my post. But I think the way it’s currently done is very backwards. You can view all records but it’s very unintuitive and most users aren’t aware of this. This leads to many data issues beyond just visibility because there is very little curation. I’ve actually thought about using inaturalist for research on cultivated trees but the data is just awful as it currently stands because most IDers aren’t aware of those observations, and because even if you were there is no way to sort for “needs ID”.

Making them visible or invisible doesn’t really relate to what’s sent to GBIF though. They can still include or exclude whatever they want. In fact, the changes I outlined should improve GBIF data because they would enable better data quality of all observations wild and cultivated.

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I have puzzled over this as well. If an obs is of a garden plant or a crop of corn, it is obvious that we are dealing with something that is not part of the natural landscape. However, as has been discussed, this gets a bit murky when dealing with cases like forestry enrichment/restoration projects using species native to the area. I have often wondered if it would make more sense to just tag things as exotic or native. This would cover things that were planted deliberately as well as wildings and escapes. I think there is value in recording both natives and exotics so we can monitor species population dynamics over time.

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I do not remember if this question has already been answered in the oast.
If trees have been planted for reforestation they are usually more or less of the same heigth and sometimes (or often depending on the location) growing ir regular disposition (in lines or all more or less at the same distance).
A wood made up of totally wild trees is much more randomly made.
Intermediate cases can be found with planted trees intermixed with wild ones or with their offspring. In such cases, users should provide a clue that there are some wild trees.

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In western Oregon, replanted forests usually have trees in a more or less random distribution, certainly not in lines, because the people doing the planting can’t walk straight lines on the steep, irregular terrain.

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Native/Introduced has nothing to do with wild or not wild, at least on iNat. The establishment means is related to the taxon, the wild/not wild to the individual organism being documented in the observation. A native plant put there by a human is not considered wild on iNat.

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