One more reason to push for separating the “captive/cultivated” category from the rest of the casuals (here’s another). I think including captive/cultivated makes sense for a project focused on urban areas, since parks and gardens (and maybe even the local zoo) are places city dwellers may visit to “interact with nature.” However, I think all the “observations” missing a critical piece of what makes an observation (picture missing/removed for copyright violation, wrong time/location, no evidence of organism etc.) should be excluded.
Also, some kind of duplicate detection and a better way for dealing with these might be helpful. E.g. as an identifier, I’ve sometimes found myself wishing for a way to detect multiple copies of an image across iNat observations. There are legitimate reasons why someone might upload an image already in the database, so if this could be implemented, people uploading an image already on iNat could be prompted to provide an explanation for why they’re doing it (e.g. identifying another organism in the picture, sharing an observation with a hiking buddy). Even better if it was possible to choose to link all the observations to the same instance of an image in the database the way this happens when you use the “duplicate” feature on an observation.