I agree with the answers made so far and I am often not sure what to do when I see an observation of a cultivated plant. I hesitate to mark it as "captive/cultivated” (even with a comment explaining it) because the observation is moved to “Casual” and the chance of getting an ID is massively reduced (Are there people looking through casual observations to ID them?). Even for observations which are already identified I have a bad feeling about it because clicking on “Organism is wild – No“ feels like degrading the observation. What is the best thing to do in these cases?
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As a complete newbie here (this is my first post, though I have uploaded several observations), I have a question related to this. I’ve tried looking through the help section for the info about captive/cultivated vs wild and did not see this addressed - what about a photo of a wild bird at a bird feeder?
I added an observation of an American Goldfinch at one of my feeders. It’s obviously a wild organism, but would it technically be considered cultivated - since it was observed at a feeder - drawn there by humans? I mean, I, the human, do intend for it to exist there, in that location, by placing the feeder, though the bird is still making the choice to be there.
Please excuse the question, I understand the answer may be obvious to those more experienced. I am not a scientist - just a photographer who loves nature.
All that said, I am happy to have found someplace to share my observations of nature and since I found this site, I have spent many hours on here - sharing, reading, researching, learning.
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Welcome to the Forum! I am also new here (started about a month ago and I really like iNat!). I think you don’t have to excuse for a question, it’s great that you ask!
Adding an observation of a wild bird at a feeder is perfectly fine since the bird decided to be there at this time, even if it is lured by the food. There is a good explanation here (but you have to find it first):
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An observation is considered wild if it is at the location due to its own actions. Thus this is wild.
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It’s best to mark them “captive/cultivated.” That protects the integrity of the data here.
However, you bring up two issues that bother me, too. I agree with the need to identify even “casual” records when we can. Also, that “thumbs down” thing on “organism wild” makes “not wild” seem like an insult, when it should be just informative. Perhaps that form could be modified.
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Regarding an added step to select wild vs captive/cultivated:
@arboretum_amy said:
Several people have suggested that (including me!) and it is usually met with enormous push back. Many well-established users cringe at the idea of observation creation taking a second longer.
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Yes, and therein lies part of the problem. Making the submission of a record very fast and easy might encourage more participation, especially by newcomers, but the downside is that it allows more records with problems to be uploaded. It would be interesting to compare the amount of time it takes for an average observer to snap a pic on their smartphone and upload it and how much time it takes for the average reviewer to “fix” that record. If the reviewer – or multiple reviewers – is spending more time and attention on the record than the submitter, then I think that’s a problem. Faster isn’t always better.
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Not only that but having not enough guidance in the beginning can also negatively affect participation.
I was inspired by posts here in the forum to help reducing the number of “Unknowns” and in this category, I quite often find observations from people with a “last active” date a few days after their “joined” date. They probably added an observation, checked again after a few days, were disappointed because nobody added an ID, and never came back. @upupa-epops pointed out that the tutorial for beginners is really short. I think that expanding it could at least partially solve some of the problems which have been discussed here.
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If we are realistic, no tutorial, onboarding etc is going to stop the flow of these. Between the fact most people won’t read it, students assigned to use the site who simply don’t give a crap about what they upload etc.
In order for this to work, someone still needs to set the flag. If a significant number of users (lets face it there are few if any identifiers who are interested in looking at these) turn it off, it just pushes the flagging down to fewer and fewer people, which creates a vicious circle as those fewer and fewer people get increasingly frustrated at the volume of them they see.
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I agree with Erwin that miscategorized observations of non-wild organisms are an issue, one that has been discussed many times, but all we ask here is that a post should be more than a mere stating of a problem.
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@tiwane here is a good reason to keep cultivated plants in the the Needs ID pool - with an option for serious scientists to choose to hide Cultivated / Captive.
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While I am only a very low volume identifier, I always set the filter to show “casual” observations when I do work on identifications. I may be one of the few, but I am interested in seeing cultivated plants. Part of my interest stems from understanding that many of the invasive plants on Pohnpei started as an intentionally planted plant. I do concur that new user onboarding via pop-up hints ought to be explored if it isn’t being looked into already.
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I try sometimes but the “casual” pile is very difficult to navigate. I’d love to be able to easily search Cultivated observations that do not already have multiple confirming IDs. Searching just now for captive observations brings up a dog with 5 agreeing IDs (which clearly does not need further input) beside all the stuff that still needs IDs.
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I also try to ID cultivated or “not wild” observations. I find it fairly easy because I know most common plants that are kept indoors, or are favs of local gardeners. If that is all the person seems to have in their observations, I try to encourage them to step out of their yard and take pictures around their neighborhood, preferably in a nearby field or open area that is less likely to have cultivated plants. I hate to think I am squashing some budding naturalist by just marking their observations as “not wild” without attempting to push them in the right (wild) direction. ;)
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Yes, exactly. I always felt arguments against slowing down the process slightly were a bit rediculous. “Doing citizen science” should take a minute.
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But it should not be unnecessary. If this is done, it needs to be very precisely targeted, I don’t want to have to confirm every sparrow, squirrel or dragonfly I record is wild.
And if this, then why not require voting and confirming that the date is accurate, the location is accurate, the photo is yours etc…
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I believe the problem is not that cultivated observations aren’t being marked “cultivated” but the fact that iNaturalist is meant to help people learn more about the world around. I see stuff growing around my town all the time and I have no clue what they are. When you mark a sighting as “cultivated” that means the sighting becomes casual and it’s removed from “Needs ID” on the identification page. that means any unidentified cultivated sighting goes in a junkpile. And just because it’s cultivated doesn’t mean it’s not worth any value on iNaturalist.
Recently, I posted the pic of the following observation. I know it’s probably cultivated but I know if I mark it as such, I will never figure out what it is. So until I get an id, I will refuse to mark it as casual because I want to learn and isn’t that the whole purpose of iNat.
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I feel you (and others). I must say, that if you know that there are IDers who don’t mind working with Casual, this feeling will fade. In Israel there are enough (albeit, barely enough) ID people who filter to include casuals that it isn’t a problem.
Also, as an aside, my other main hobby is videogames – where “casual” (most unfortunately) is sometimes used as a pejorative lol
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So then, would it be fair to say “Needs ID” should indicate that something needs a community ID, and should only filter out observations that already have 2/3 consensus on species (regardless of whether or not it is wild)?
E.g. the dog with 5 IDs already would be filtered out, but if there was another appropriately noted pet dog with only have 1 ID at species, it would be part of the results until it got a 2nd “canis familiaris” ID (at which point it too would be filtered out)
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Identify page, for me, comes with a filter “Needs ID” (we all get that one) and for “New Zealand” courtesy of my account settings. Wouldn’t it be a simple thing to include additional account settings to include/exclude “casual” observations into the Identify filter, and perhaps even to include “Research Grade” if the identifier would like to review ALL observations…
I can imagine this being implemented, and all existing accounts getting the “casual” option set, and a message out to all users to advise them that they can turn it off in their account settings… A one-time action to maintain the status quo. My thinking with the default setting of the casuals is that there will be a large number of “don’t care either way” users, and it would be better to have them default to inclusion of casual observations in their Identify page. Those that don’t want it are likely to be active and committed enough to be able to figure out how to switch them back off :)
Even better still, it would be great if we could change the filters in the Identify page to what we want, and then “save as default” so that those settings are what automatically come up when we go to the identify page. I almost imagine this would be easier to implement than the account settings option I raise above would be…
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Posts like @danaleeling 's inspire me to add Casuals into my Unknown id’ing pile, but the reality of that is what stops me.
Is there a way to filter by flags to exclude all Casual records that have been marked with incorrect location, incorrect date, no recent evidence of organism, or no evidence of organism? If I can sort the Casual pile with more granularity, I can focus on “nonbroken” Casual entries along with the rest of the Unknowns.
Edit: Note, I am not necessarily requesting extra checkboxes for “Has Location” “Has Date” alongside “Has Photos”, but could really use info on how to construct a chunk of the exclusionary search url, like “&location_specified=yes&date_specified=yes” or whatever it would look like.
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