I started posting observations to iNaturalist yesterday, including an observation of a Liquidambar tree growing in a backyard:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/111340408
The tree grew where it was on its own, presumably from a seed dropped by the neighbor’s tree that is just on the other side of the fence in the picture.
I initially was unsure whether this counted as “wild” or “cultivated”, but I thought it counted as “wild”, so I uploaded it as “wild”, but it quickly got reclassified as “cultivated”.
I re-read the guidelines and saw that a “tree planted 1, 10, or 100 years ago by humans” counts as “cultivated”, whereas the following count as “wild”:
- “weed or other unintended plant growing in a garden”;
- “garden plant that is reproducing on its own and spreading outside of the intended gardening area”;
- “living organisms dispersed by the wind, water, and other forces apart from humans”.
The tree that was the subject of the observation
- was not planted any number of years ago by humans and
- grew without human intent (which I assumed is what “unintended” means) in (what later became) a garden,
- as a result of a garden plant (the neighbor’s tree) reproducing on its own and spreading outside of the intended gardening area, and
- as a result of living organisms (the neighbor’s tree’s seeds) being dispersed by the wind.
Re-reading the guidelines, I was pretty sure it counted as “wild”, so I unmarked it as “cultivated”. It was very quickly re-marked as “cultivated”, and I did not wish to contest that further.
Is the observation correctly marked as “cultivated”? Did I misunderstand the guidelines? If so, how should I understand them differently?
Tentatively, I suspect the answer is that the guidelines don’t mention that, to protect the purity of the research data, it’s preferred that questionable observations be misclassified as “cultivated” than misclassified as “wild”, and thus it’s proper that people marking observations as “cultivated” err on the side of doing so over-eagerly?
Finally, I’d like to apologize for taking up the community’s time with the matter of my questionable observation, which I don’t suppose is really very useful.