I recently posted a Yellow-cedar from a well-sampled location and was surprised to see that there were no other dots in the area. Then within a few minutes, my observation was marked “not wild.” This prompted me to search casual grade observations and I found that all the records of this species from the same general area had been marked not wild. These are observations that have habitat context in the photos and are obviously wild trees. The observations all come from within the native range of the species. The down voting appears to be attributed to inaturalist itself. Is there an explanation for this? Examples:
Yes, if the majority of observations of a particular taxon in a particular region have been marked as not wild by users, then iNaturalist will automatically mark new observations as not wild.
Sometimes that ends up being wrong (but most often not), but you can then countervote, as you have done for your observations.
(I’ve moved this to general because it isn’t a bug, it’s normal behaviour as explained above)
the exact conditions are:
“The system will vote that the observation is not wild/naturalized if there are at least 10 other observations of a genus or lower in the smallest county-, state-, or country-equivalent place that contains this observation and 80% or more of those observations have been marked as not wild/naturalized.”
that’s a different issue to the ‘bug’ raised by OP, and would require each observation to be checked to see whether: a) the person who uploaded the pic marked it as captive, b) someone else marked it as captive, or c) whether it was another case of the system marking it as captive
Well, in any case, I went through and added my votes that they are wild. If they get voted captive again, we will know that some human, not the system, is doing it.