Cultivated/wild : the false dilemma of nature vs culture

Nature Talk
1

On iNaturalist, native status is indicated by a simple checkbox: “Was it in captivity/cultivated?”
With the following explanation: “Was the organism being raised in captivity? For example, was it in a garden, a zoo, an aquarium, or any other situation where it was present solely because humans had chosen to place it there? All sightings of living creatures are welcome, but we want to know when these creatures are not wild or naturalized.”

In my view, these organisms have a life of their own, and human intentions matter little, especially since humans are far from having everything under control in the long run; proof of this can be found in the numerous cases of escapes and releases into the wild from enclosures or laboratories. The same is true for invasive alien species: naturalization and biological invasion phenomena have been described; they have followed a well-known trajectory that is often broken down into four stages:

  • introduction
  • colonization
  • establishment
  • dispersal

The characteristics of invasion manifest themselves to varying degrees, and the time required to move from one stage to the next varies. I think it’s impossible to predict with any certainty which one will go through all the stages and become invasive in a given location, since that depends on adaptations and random mutations.

We are thus dealing more with a continuum covering a whole range of intermediate situations between two extremes:

  • survival in a confined/controlled environment,
  • complete autonomy in reproduction and dissemination in the “natural/wild” environment.

The field to be filled in should not be limited to this simplistic false dichotomy that iNaturalist currently imposes on us, but should be more detailed to reflect the complexity of real-world situations.

Furthermore, since I find this option insufficient for capturing reality, I generally do not fill it in on iNaturalist, so as not to lose valuable data in the limbo of “informal data”.

PS: this dichotomy probably makes more sense in temperate zones, where tropical species have a hard time surviving the winter; conversely, in tropical zones, most introduced species are likely to end up in the wild at some point.

PS2: It is hightly subjective to decide on hybrid cases between wild and cultivated. Does a wild plant collected from nature and placed in a pot become cultivated? After how long is a clonal organism (such as bamboo or pineapple) that has been introduced and persists without human intervention, considered to be wild? At what point is a species considered domesticated? How much wild are sinanthrope species that mostly depend on humans (ex: rats, Western house martin)? To what extent is a wild habitat/ecosystem truly wild when archaeological data is taken into account?

2

Welcome to the iNat Forum!

You may want to check out many of the previous forum conversations about how Captive and Wild are defined on iNat. For instance, captive/wild on iNat does not depend on whether a species is an

but on the specific individual organism in the observation. Some of the other elements of your post indicate that you may be thinking about invasive species as opposed to organisms which isn’t how this field is used on iNat. iNat’s full help documentation is here: https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000169932-what-does-captive-cultivated-mean-

I would also note that

could be an issue, though I am not sure exactly what your quote means. Users who intentionally do not mark lots of cultivated organisms that they upload as such are generally warned and have been suspended in some cases for continuing to upload lots of unmarked captive/cultivated organisms. It’s fine to not use this field on other user’s observations or in situations where users are unsure if the organism meets iNat’s criteria for captive/wild.

3

Just to add that the “introduced” (arrived in the region via anthropogenic means, ~invasive) character of the species is determined by the database, you don’t have to check a box or do anything.
Unlike for the “captivity/cultivated” aspect…

4

There is often disagreement on whether “captive/cultivated” means “occurring with human assistance” or “outright placed without autonomy by humans”.

The first case means many weeds (especially in gardens, lawns, or urban areas) don’t qualify as “wild” because they receive human assistance, be it watering/irrigation, dispersal not possible naturally, or a habitat that isn’t “natural”. There becomes a grey area where human interface mixes with wild habitats, largely decided on a case-by-case basis.

The second case restricts the definition of captive entirely to specific individual introductions or translocation. For instance, zoo animals, plants placed in a garden or restoration site, or released pets. The grey area is when you have something artificially introduced that starts reproducing naturally, and spreading, which may produce “wild” offspring that are no longer captive.

Generally, most people refer to the second, and so does iNat. Some people stick by the first definition strictly. Personally I found it worthwhile studying how species adapt, disperse and occur in “anthropogenic” habitats, and a lot of interesting data comes out of it.

5

I agree this checkbox is way too simplistic and causes a lot of wrong assumptions and questionable data.

I mainly encounter problems here with tropical butterfly and moth observations just outside of butterfly houses or zoos in Europe. Although it’s 100% clear that the butterfly must have just escaped from the butterfly house, where it was definitely intentionally put by humans, many users argue that the butterfly is wild, ‘since humans did not intend for it to be outside the butterfly house’ and since the iNat guidelines say escapees are wild, as ‘they are no longer controlled by humans’.

I think the main problem here is that people (including staff) talk about a 'wild/captive attribute’. However, the opposite of captive is not wild, but rather free. An escaped butterfly is free as it escaped from captivity. Maybe a long living big animal that escaped can eventually become wild, but a single escaped insect thousands of kilometers from its natural habitat by definition can never be wild, as individual insects can only be considered wild when they’re the offspring of an established population, or reached that far away location on their own (for example by being taken by strong winds). So, if one of those free butterflies found a mate and somehow survived the European climate, its offspring would be considered wild.

The distinction is very important, as marking an escaped tropical butterfly ‘wild’ will make the observation Research Grade. This means the data is exported to third parties like GBIF and the observation will be represented on the distribution map for the species, suggesting there’s a viable, established population thousands of kilometers away from the natural habitat.

I understand that observations of exotic organisms shouldn’t be discarded too easily, as they offer important data about the spread of invasive species, but I think an exception should be made for these cases where it’s clear where the butterfly came from.

6

Although I completely understand iNat’s desire to ‘weed out’ domestic/captive/cultivated species, this is objectively a good argument. I would like to add to what was said that non-wild species are still interacting with wild organisms around them… they can’t really be divorced from their environment (even if they’re in a cage or a pot). Garden flowers are visited by wild pollinators or eaten by native species, or captives will eat local wild plants/animals (e.g., house cats eating birds) or can be parasitized by something from outside. I still think the wild/not-wild annotation is very useful (even criticial) but maybe shouldn’t be used to exclude an observation from the wider database.

(And no, I don’t think this will ever be changed in iNat, it’s just a valid alternate way of looking at things. For my own personal life lists, I usually count anything found in the wild regardless of how it got there or how long it’s been there. For example, I have to deduct about a half dozen birds from my birding list if I share it with anyone because I count escapees/releases that the wider community doesn’t accept).

7

iNat jargon defines Wild and Not Wild. The bigger issue is that ‘Not Wild’ becomes Casual and is taken out of the Needs ID queue.

8

This makes the most sense to me for how to think of wild or not wild. If it can interact with other wild organisms, then it is part of that local environment, even if it can’t survive long term. Even something like a potted plant kept outside through it’s survivable seasons.

I’ve been planting various natives around my yard. They’re outside, being fed on by pollinators, insects, and birds and will in time provide shelter as well. However, because I put them there, they would be considered captive.

I think I would make the captive distinction only for something that is kept strictly indoors, isolated any wild interactions. To use joeybom’s example, an exotic butterfly in an isolated enclosure would be captive, the same butterfly outdoors would be wild.

9

The captive/ wild division does throw up certain anomalies. My view on this topic is that purpose of iNaturalist is not just about recording the location and abundance of individual organisms, but to also provide information that will assist to understanding their ecological role in their environment. As example, a single specimen of a male dioecious tree growing in a natural area that would appear to have been deliberately planted, would fit the “casual -captive or planted” category because it does not have the capacity to spread further from its location. A monoecious tree bearing seed in the same situation I think should be deemed wild, even if it very likely to have been planted. This is to account for the possibility of a new organism being introduced to that location.

10

From older threads:

  1. apparently if at least 80% of local observations for a species are marked as cultivated, new observations are automatically marked as cultivated
  2. in the “Data Quality Assessment” summary (lower part of the observation page) you can up/down vote the wild/cultivated criteria
  3. if you want your “casual” observation to appear in the “Needs ID” list (or “Research Grade” if it’s already ID’d), you can add your own countervote to your observation

Correct me if I’m wrong, I’m discovering all these subtilities…

11

There are two aspects to what iNaturalist considers “captive/cultivated”. You seem only concerned with what constitutes real-world data, whereas iNaturalist also has to consider what constitutes a positive interaction with nature. These differing aspects of the site’s main mission are outlined in the help topic:

The main reason we try to mark things like this is because iNat is primarily about observing wild organisms, not pets, animals in zoos, garden plants, specimens in drawers, etc., and many scientific data partners are often not interested in (or downright alarmed by) observations of captive or cultivated organisms.

The section in bold is purely normative: it’s a statement about how things should be, rather than being a definition of how things actually are. iNaturalist wants to encourage people to interact positively with nature, not simply maximise the amount of usable data it produces. This is a very important distinction that is highlighted every year during the CNC events. Many of the well-known problems with these events are ultimately caused by a failure to enforce the site’s policies concerning what an observation should be about: there’s much more to interacting with (and recording) nature than thoughtlessly pointing a camera at every object that looks vaguely organic.

As we all know, there are no real-world boundaries between what is wild and what is not, so there’s little point in trying to come up with more complex definitions. In practical terms, it’s far better to just keep things simple and let the community decide matters on a case by case basis via the DQA voting. The advice given at the end of the help topic seems entirely reasonable:

Please use your best judgement based on the evidence provided in the observation.

12

I used to dislike the label, but over time I’ve realized that there’s a special kind of data that comes out of weeding “captive” data that you can’t normally get. Take plants for instance. Our knowledge on how plants can reproduce and jump the fence is effectively unknown because most botany study focuses on plants in wild areas, and urban botany is quite undervalued.

In California, some ornamental plants will only naturalize in a narrow fringe of coastal habitat that receives marine fog. Otherwise, they are captive and never spread. We count on observations being marked correctly to identify these ecological situations. Sometimes, someone will plant something that’s rare in gardens and we can witness it trying to (and maybe failing, maybe not) spread, which is unknown knowledge. This kind of data has a use, maybe not now, maybe not to many, but it’s a kind of ecological informative expression we don’t have access to otherwise.

Working to figure out that grey zone, and how to apply it, creates some of the most interesting niche data that is effectively unknown to science and the modern world.

On one hand I think it’s good that it’s easy to mark someone’s observations casual. On the other , it’s frustrating when you have obviously wild data marked to casual with little ability to contest it. Sometimes you have a garden plant seen natively in the wild that got thrown into the bin because some people don’t believe they can “ever” be wild. We’ve also had some local groups or organizations use iNat data for newly invasive weed mapping – and so when someone comes in and says “this cannot be a weed”, and tips the dataset into the bin, it forces organizations to not use iNat anymore, which I think is sad.

13

This shouldn’t be done just because an observer wants their observations to be Needs ID as opposed to Casual. It should be done if the organism is actually Wild and not Captive/Cultivated. If a user adds an intentionally incorrect vote for “Wild” to an observation of a Captive/Cultivated organism solely to put in Needs ID, this would be considered abuse of the DQA.

14

Sure, but I don’t expect many users to record plants in agricultural fields or urban parks…

That said this annual city challenge seems to have a real importance here, hard to have a really “naturalist” approach in this case, and your warning might be more fit for these situations.

Outside of this competition there are a lot of observed organisms that are not cultivated but from foreign origin, and in this case I consider it the right thing to add a “wild” vote to our own observation, although this might be a marginal case.

Of course it’s not always obvious, for example a tree might have been planted then the land abandoned, and it might falsely look like a “natural” growth… or a cat that seems feral might just be wandering outdoor for a couple of hours in a natural habitat, etc.

15

About 1 in 10 vascular plant observations on iNaturalist are not wild. Many of these observations are indeed made in urban parks or gardens. Many new users make observations of cultivated plants because they see plants and associate them with nature, because they think iNat is an app where you take a photo of something and get an ID, because they haven’t thought about the distinction between wild and non-wild and why it might be relevant for understanding biodiversity, or because they don’t know which plants are likely to be cultivated and which are weeds.

16

1 in 10… of course as I mentioned these city competitions must have some serious weight in this proportion.

But for “naturalist” work, it’s perfectly appropriate to signal if a species is wild, or not.

17

What makes you think events like the CNC account for most of the cultivated plants on iNaturalist? The CNC is also responsible for an oversized percentage of genuinely wild observations on iNaturalist. The proportion of non-wild is no doubt larger than during other periods, but even if you were to take out the CNC there would still be a lot of non-wild plants on iNaturalist. Plants don’t run away when you try to photograph them, so they are easy for the novice user equipped only with a cell phone, and most people encounter a lot of non-wild plants in their everyday lives – unlike animals, where (with a few exceptions, like cats and dogs) most individuals one encounters are going to be wild. And cultivated plants are more likely to be showy and attract attention and an impulse to want to know what it is compared to wild plants like sidewalk weeds that are inconspicuous.

New users make observations of cultivated plants outside the context of the CNC simply because they don’t know any better. And some experienced users upload plants that they know are cultivated because they are tracking interactions or for some other reason. And it is not uncommon for users to neglect to mark such observations as cultivated because they want to get an ID and they know that fewer IDers look at casual observations.

It is fine to signal that a cultivated plant is not wild during events like the CNC as well. It does not mean that people do.

18

If iNaturalist wants to encourage people to interact positively with nature, it begins in people’s closed environment and garden, even with cultivated species… Lot of gardeners even don’t know what they cultivate. We are sometimes surprised to discover the common species cultivate everwhere is actually another one, because nobody use to have a look on it…

If the purpose is not to maximise the amount of usable data iNaturalist produces, perhaps it would be to let people enter the naturalist community. Then, that doesn’t matter if the provided data is cultivated, and not a rare species that only specialist would understand the value…

Let’s stop being snob with wilderness.

Furthermore, dealing with artificial and urban counditions is one of the aspects I thought I would mostly find in the City Nature Challenge.

19

The data provided by someone reveal as much about the environment, as on the perception someone has of it.

Those data serve as a resource for both the hard and the soft sciences…

20

What I actually said is that “iNaturalist wants to encourage people to interact positively with nature, not simply maximise the amount of usable data it produces”. So it wants to achieve both of these things, rather than making one of them more important than the other.

Well, the “captive/cultivated” checkbox does exactly that. It actually allows observers to upload observations of subjects which aren’t “wild” (in the broad sense defined by iNaturalist). The problem is that many users don’t tick that checkbox when they know (or at least strongly suspect) that the subject isn’t wild - which is the exact opposite of snobbery.