Are we allowed to post pictures of cultivated plants?

Hello!
I was wondering if we are allowed to post pictures of cultivated plants. I have an array of alpine photos I would love to contribute.

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I think you are allowed to post pictures of cultivated plants as long as you mark the plants as cultivated.

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I was wondering if you do put a plant that is cultivated and put as casual as I think it is called on inat, does it still count on your species list

Yes it does. Photo-less obs count too…

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Short answer - yes. However, you may want to peruse this thread to get some understanding of people’s feelings about that topic! Absolutely tired of plants not marked as cultivated - Solutions welcome - General - iNaturalist Community Forum

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Posting cultivated plants that are not the common pansies and roses really can be helpful to some users. Especially if the plants are species observers can see in the wild somewhere. Post away! (Marking the observations as cultivated, of course.)

I think iNaturalist doesn’t handle cultivated plants well, but post them and maybe iNaturalist will do better eventually
.

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I finished uploading years of photos of living things I’ve seen in “nature,” and still have over 3500 pics from botanical gardens around the US. I’ve been procrastinating because of the probability that they will languish unidentified, or that I’ll alienate my few followers (mostly moth-ers) by bombing my feed with plants.
I’m going to wax philosophical here:
I think encouraging people to interact with “nature” is a wonderful goal. However, it’s a delusion of modern society to think that we are not part of nature. How does a species (Homo sapiens) that collects plants into botanical gardens differ from a birds (Magpies, Bower Birds) that collects objects? Collecting is human nature, humans belong to the natural world, therefore, “captive” plants in gardens are part of “nature.”
But I digress…

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Yes, you are. You just need to mark it as cultivated/captive.

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In general they don’t. But if the magpie wanted to create an app that focused on observations of inanimate objects that HAVEN’T been collected or moved by other magpies, then that would be a synonymous case.

The distinction is an important one, given that the amount of “nature” that has not been impacted by humans, is rapidly diminishing. Its not unrealistic to imagine a not too distant future where the only plants that exist will be those that have had human involvement, that the only animals left on the Earth are here because humans allowed them to be.

Every species on this planet interacts with or is impacted by a range of other species, but it’s fair to say that humans impact a far greater number, and in far more devastating ways, than any other. The iNat distinction around what is impacted by humans is very much the point!

Having said that though, the cultivated stuff is the bridge by which many will get to the message, and for many of us we just wouldn’t be a part of iNat if it was excluded outright when we joined. As an analogy, you don’t convert a lot of meat eaters to vegetarianism by banning them from your cooking classes!

[Edit: that vegetarian analogy is actually pretty close to the mark, in that you also wouldn’t expect to be allowed to bring meat into the vegetarian cooking class… But if 99% of your students only know meat, then a degree of tolerance at the outset will bring them in the door, so that you can show them that vegetarian alternatives exist… If that makes sense]

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