A common mistake is marking a bee or butterfly on a rose that someone planted “captive/cultivated.” This is because while the plant is cultivated because it’s at the exact time and place a human intended it to be, the bee is not captive because the bee is at the exact time and place it intended to be, and not all users understand this (I’m not judging or saying any names, but it is kinda common for new users). Read more here. Here are things that should be marked as “captive/cultivated”:
A pet dog
A caged budgie
A zinnia in your garden
A canna lily in someone else’s garden
A daisy that you planted
Here are things that shouldn’t be marked as “captive/cultivated”:
For example, the image above is a Silvery Checkerspot on a Black-eyed Susan. The flower is where I intended it to be, whereas the butterfly is where it intended to be. Marking it captive is pretty much stating “hey, this is my pet.” If you see an observation marked as “wild” and is not your observation, there is a DQA (Data Quality Assessment) vote that can mark an observation as “wild” or “captive/cultivated.” For fossils please select the thumbs-down “date is accurate” (I use the website; if the DQA thing looks different on the app, please look for anything that looks like an option to disagree with the DQA vote next to it) DQA vote. Thank you for reading this topic!
A “Stray” dog is a pet that has temporarily escaped
A “Feral” dog is no longer a pet, but a dog that descends from a pet or is no longer “looked after” by a human owner.
I would not called an escaped pet a stray. Stray is already abandoned by ‘feckless previous owners’. Stray animals need feeding and care by animal charities. Wild by iNat’s definition, in the same way that the birds that come to our garden feeder are Wild, despite being fed.
And then you have this taxonomy which defines feral as a type of stray! There isn’t a universally accepted definition of many of these terms. Hence the constant debate. So in the tutorial list, stray should be defined or people won’t know what definition to use.
“Date is accurate” is for when the stated observation date doesn’t match the actual observation date. E.g. you can see snow in the photo but it says it was made in the summer, or a photo of a museum specimen with a label with an old date on it but the observation date is the same as the upload date. I can’t tell if that’s what you meant, but a flower could naturally bloom in the wrong season for some reason and that would be legitimate.
I don’t know about the other apps, but in the android one it is not possible to vote on any DQA except “captive/cultivated” (and even then it is difficult to tell whether one has in fact checked the box or not).
Weeelll, “summer” and “snow” are not necessarily mutually exclusive…
(Sorry, raised in Colorado, where weird weather was a thing long before climate change; I am not arguing with your underlying point)
I am in Cape Town, way down South – and we had a year when there was snow on Table Mountain. In December.
Plant people who use the phenology graphs do speak my language.
This isn’t always correct. Native plants in a cultivated wildflower patch are still cultivated, and naturalized plants outside of their native range are still wild. That is, zinnias observed in a window box in Mexico City should be marked “captive/cultivated”.
I have had issues in the past where I have posted a plant I noted to be likely naturalized (e.g. spread from nearby garden or apparently self seeded) that other users have marked as not wild under the assumption that the observation was of a captive/cultivated organism, even if I comment that the plant was seemingly naturalized. While I think it is important to mark not wild where appropriate, marking as such without evidence also risks hiding early spread of alien species since Casual observations are not exported to GBIF.
I think the definition is unworkable. For any organism that is in the observed location only through the action of a person, the definition cannot depend on that unknown person’s intentions.
That distinction is the case for domestic cats and dogs, a lot of “weeds”, and managed hives of non-native honeybees.
