They must be a sterile triploid variety. Your comment got me thinking and I realized that the ones I had seen were also a triploid variety (kwanso). Now that I think about the spots I have found them, they were downhill from ROWs that had been cleared by brushcutters. I guess there could have been rhizome pieces caught up in the machinery at previous cut locations that go knocked loose and washed downhill. Still a reason not to trust daylilies as old homesite indicators.
Tangent: My mom collected daylilies before she really got into native plants. We would sometimes cross them for fun. They were all diploid varieties. Usually the offspring were not very pretty. This is the only one that came out nice. It came out with a light peach colored halo instead of the purple halo of one of the parents and didn’t end up with wonky shaped blooms like a bunch of our other crosses.
I think another point with ‘assuming cultivated’ is that if a plant is only present in cultivation in an area, having them left as wild will mean they incorrectly show up as expected nearby in the CV, which makes it a more likely ID than it really is - which then tends to balloon, as is frequently pointed out in other contexts.
If there really is a wild population, that’s well worth knowing, but experience suggests that far more people fail to mark ‘not wild’ for cultivated plants than ever get it right. So if you’re finding escaped garden plants, I’d recommend adding a comment to explain, not assuming that others will assume you’re using the system as intended (since so many don’t).
I actually think the current iNaturalist system works well in general. After all, nearly every tulip in North America is not wild but nearly all American Robins are wild, so why not have the computer mark them that way? No system is perfect, of course. We have to be aware that there are cases where the system will go wrong and compensate for them.
What can we do? If you know it’s wild, comment! Explain why you think it’s wild. Preemptively mark it wild. Also, occasionally search for all your observations that are marked casual. If you find some erroneously marked that way, fix it; vote it wild, communicate with the person who marked it casual, or tag other iNatters to mark it wild.
Actually I believe the geomodel does include non-wild observations (in contrast to the previous “seen nearby” model, where they were excluded). I think this was a good decision – there are always going to be users uploading cultivated plants, regardless of whether the CV supports them. Given that, I would rather that they get good CV suggestions from the start rather than being misidentified as some completely different local wild plant, which is what used to happen. It means there are fewer IDs that need to be corrected. (The suggestions would be even better, however, if hybrid plants were included in the CV.)
If you’re a researcher who is working on plants that are frequently cultivated or may have escaped cultivation, you are likely going to want to check observations marked as “not wild” anyway. Since as you note, you need to “comb through the data yourself before using it”, other users marking ambiguous observations as “not wild” are not making choices about the data set for you any more than if they marked the observations as “wild” (or refrained from marking them as “not wild”).
Other users are also making assessments in good faith about whether a particular specimen is wild or not. Maybe their assessment will agree with yours, maybe it won’t. You are free to counter their not-wild votes at any time. This isn’t taking away your agency or skewing “your” dataset to be under-inclusive. Rather, it is a collective effort to manage the data in a way that is relevant for many (not all) uses. And for a lot of these uses, it is likely going to be helpful to not have to sort out hundreds of observations of plants that experience suggests are probably cultivated (e.g. because most people observing these species are doing so in urban settings and do not have the knowledge to recognize the difference between wild and cultivated or why this matters).
I feel its good practice to leave a note when you mark an observation as not wild. That generates the notification to the user. E.g. "I have marked this one as captive/cultivated (not wild) based on the photo & location. To see how inaturalist thinks about wild v captive/cultivated animals and plants, please see https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#captive . Please forgive and correct me if I got this wrong. Thanks! "
99% of the time there’s no response, but a few times I’ve had a ‘thanks, I didn’t know that’ or a ‘actually this one is self-seeded’
Recently, though, when faced with CNC projects featuring tens of thousands of cultivated plants marked as wild, each, the time it takes to do this is not worth the result, especially when most of the users were duress users, and unlikely to ever return.
I think this almost entirely comes from fatigue from IDers that work on life/kingdom/unknowns or plant/location specifically. We have to sort through SO MANY cultivated plants (even potted plants/flowers in vases) and blurry, completely unidentifiable photos. It can be exhausting and time-consuming to be diligent about leaving comments when marking the obs as cultivated. Particularly when so many are duress users or inactive from years ago.
As someone who frequents super life/kingdom level and unknown IDs, just a one or two word note saying “self seeded” or “weed” is SO, SO appreciated. It would likely cut down on this happening for anyone frustrated by this by a LOT. It lets IDers know you you’re paying attention and thinking about what you’re uploading and aware that iNat distinguishes between wild and captive/cultivated.
Confused and irritated works both ways.
Observers should provide the info that identifiers need to use.
Then observers can expect identifiers to use the info they provided.
But Wild vs Not Wild is one vote, and easily countered with one click (and a note to self - leave a Self Seeded Note Next Time)
so … you don’t make it easy, or even possible, for the identifiers you rant at.
If you click on the number alongside the NO for Wilded in the DQA you can see who voted for the “No” (or ditto “Yes”) - ask them in a comment to reconsider and remove their votes.
If it is labelled “iNat” then it was a system flag - then just cancel it by ticking " Yes" - unfortunately there are no messages when iNat does this - I would strongly support a vote that iNaturalist posts a comment on the observation when it does so.
But best, when uploading, clearly mention that it is wild if there is any chance of doubt.
Arguing with people who stuff up my observations without a note is not on my to do list.
If there is still value left in the observation, I leave it, if not, I’ll delete it.
Luckily no one can mess with the date, location, notes and photos.
I stopped posting escaped cultivars and started to look up agricultural and horticultural sites for identification.
most of the prolific identifiers who deal with the vast majority of records simply don’t have time to write a nice neat note on every observation they visit for a few seconds. are you clearly writing a note on observations that could be mistaken for cultivated? do you really think identifiers trying to properly label cultivated plants are intentionally “messing with” the data quality? I’m genuinely asking here.
I do comment garden plant?
but only for a very few. Mostly because a comment generates notifications, while the DQA doesn’t. If I want to follow where that ID goes.
Yes.
I only post introduced plants if they are spreading. I get an ID and and a cultivated tag because it is outside of the natural range. These observations are still good as reference for me so that’s fine.
iNat is not set up to track introduced species spreading. Posting escaped cultivars is especially discouraged.
Messing up I mean clearly wrong ID and no response to queries or just bumping up to kingdom. If the observation is for something common, it is more effective to get rid of it.
that has made my whole day!