That is exactly what I did and why I did it for the Aesculus hippocastanum observation I referred to above. Users have got to learn that observations that are out of the ordinary like that need more justification than otherwise would be the case. A note supporting why they are actually wild is needed.
I too would normally mark a non-native species that is not naturalised, especially when growing in a park or garden location as cultivated. The clue’s in it being non-naturalised. That means default cultivated. Non-natives certainly can become naturalised and indeed invasive. Hence Ailanthus altissima being restricted so much in recent years for example.
The line has to be drawn somewhere along the great continuum, so that is where they have chosen to put it. While I have argued for a substantially different line, I think it is necessary to follow the current rules.
For the CNC, the current line gives people an opportunity to think about what cultivation means and how a particular plant got where it is and whether having it there is desirable.
On the other hand, it generates a lot of low-value observations in the iNaturalist database. That is an issue for the iNat community to manage, not a responsibility of CNC.
How is that? The iNat community only has to manage this annual flood of low-value observations because the CNC is mainly hosted on iNat. While CNC participants are not the only ones to generate low-value observations, they are responsible for a huge percentage of them. CNC organizers surely therefore have some responsibility to educate participants so that their activities do not place a burden on the community whose infrastructure and resources they are using. CNC observations end up in the same pile as all other observations, meaning that data users and people volunteering their time to care for iNat’s data can’t simply skip over these observations.
As of this moment there are 177,395 observations made during the CNC time period which have been marked as captive/cultivated, though I don’t know how to tell how many were originally part of CNC projects on a global scale without having to look at each city’s project requirements and replicate them in the URL. That’s about 5.1% of all observations made during this period.
A surprisingly high number for me, allthough I sorted out some obs while IDing. It seems that there is still some need in teaching the difference between “cultivated” and “wild”.
That number will grow as identifiers work their way through the observations. I think I have eliminated maybe 1,000 from one city so far, and there are thousands more cultivated plants still in there. It will take a lot of time to get through them all.
The best practice for observing a plant-feeding insect is to make a linked observation of the host individual, whether that individual is wild or cultivated. Insect ID often depends on host ID, and the host ID is just hearsay unless there’s an observation. Such host observations – including of cultivated hosts – are more important for research than most “research grade” ID’s on iNaturalist.
