I have a user marking wild invasive species as captive. The user says this is because they use iNat’s German version in which the equivalent to the captive section in DQA is “in Haltung / kultiviert” which the user takes to mean “captive / naturalized or not native”. I am assuming that this can only be a misunderstanding on the user’s part, and that the application is the same? Or is there actually a different application of DQA across different countries’ versions of iNat? (I’m also not aware if there is actually a German version of iNat like iNat Canada etc. or if the user just means they have their language set as German).
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That’s disturbing. “Captive/cultivated” on iNaturalist has nothing to do with native/exotic/naturalized. This is making the data misleading.
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Difficult enough in English to accept that iNat’s jargon makes ‘Not Wild’ (and also obs missing data) into Casual. There are many forum posts about this. A Cultivated plant in iNat does not mean what it means outside iNat - it only means someone once planted that - maybe a tree - a hundred years ago = Cultivated for the rest of its life. Where the ‘cultivation’ consists of I was planted. It must be difficult, or outright impossible, to translate iNat’s jargon.
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That does not mean “captive /naturalized or not native“, it still means “captive /cultivated“ …. but the termes themselfs can be difficult to understand sometime, independently of your background, (may it be language/ or science related background) - there are so many cases that have been discussed in the forum where it is not very clear..
What we have to understand is that we are putting a human made system, human made categoried onto nature, and sometimes it just does not fit perfectly… although the example you mention enough just requires a (politely given) reference/ clarification to what is menat by these terms in general and -especially- here in iNaturalitst - sometimes somone that can serve as a translater in both languages (translating between English and German in this case; or maybe also between Science terminology and non-Science backgroundn language; or possibly iNat newbie- non iNat newbie lingo)
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No, there isn’t.
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Eoghan @man4nature, I think Gerrit @gerrit_oehm answered your German language question. Regarding your question about:
The answer is no, not at the moment. You can see the current members of the iNaturalist Network here: https://www.inaturalist.org/sites/network
And you can read about the benefits of creating a country network here: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/network-join
One benefit that is often mentioned is that as a network member, you can see obscured observations, which helps you with conservation planning.