I agree that the location should reflect where the organism (in this case the pine cone) was observed, and that, so long as it reached that location without human assistance, this merits research grade.
A well-designed annotation system could allow researchers to separately map different life stages of plants. But even without that, the presence of photos in iNat allows a researcher to examine edge-of-range observations after the fact. In this case, someone can identify this observation as beyond the expected range and seeing the photo and comments can easily understand why.
This scenario does provide another example of why including elevation (either observer-supplied, calculated, or both) would be valuable in iNat. See these threads:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/altitude-on-observations/1476/2
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/filter-by-elevation/5606