As there are many cultivated plant observations on iNat, I am wondering if we can add taxon(s) for garden plants which can include all the different varieties so we can help people identify garden plants as well. This can also help nurseries on understand changes and patterns in blooming and seeding seasons. I believe that iNat should be a place for nurseries and garden plant euthenists to use as apart of the community here.
For an example, we can add a taxon for garden clematis for garden breed species and add subspecies for each of the individual breeds.
iNaturalist has made it clear they won’t make up taxonomy in the way you are suggesting. What you can do is use the genus or section of the garden taxon as your ID and use observation fields to add breed, variety, or cultivar information. For examples, see Observation Fields Search· iNaturalist.
Observations of plants raised for sale under unnatural conditions won’t provide useful information about blooming and seeding seasons.
It also seems to me that there are plenty of other ways that horticulturalists can collect this information more systematically than on a website where most people are interested in wild organisms. There are other websites specifically for gardeners.
I use iNaturalist for “wild” observations, garden plants and botanical garden collections. I think the very concept that humans and the species they cultivate purposefully are not part of nature is absurd. Categorizing living things as “wild” versus “cultivated” is part of a paradigm that does not see the earth and humans on it as a global ecology. If you’re going to purport that all living things have evolved, then humans who supposedly evolved and their cultivation of plants or breeding of animal species for any purpose would also be part of the global process of evolution. In which case, what purpose does it serve to place the artificial categories of “wild” and “cultivated?” If an animal was cultivated, but escapes and now forms a “wild” population, at what point did that happen? Is it a different species now that it lives free of human interference? If a “cultivated” plant escapes and now grows across the road from my garden, is it not still the same species? Does it only become “wild” after a certain amount of time? (And when does it become naturalized and not invasive?)
I will continue to do as directed above regarding varieties of plants, of course. I’m glad that the taxonomists that curate iNaturalist still permit cultivated species to be uploaded and identified, but I wish that the label “cultivated” didn’t automatically reduce the likelihood that an item in a botanical garden, for example, would ever be identified without at-mentioning lead identifiers.
Just my two cents.
Despite a few corner cases and gray areas, iNaturalist answers it fairly clearly - as soon as the animal had escaped. The potential future outcome (from a population or taxonomy viewpoint) is deliberately not relevant.
This has of course no bearing on whether it is desirable or not to have any observation identified - hence several feature requests.
Still going thru the CNC residue. Found a batch where a newbie, who has since abandoned iNat - had marked all their Wild obs as Casual. Promptly binned. Many since IDed as Plantae. Binned again. A substantial chunk of CNC not RG will fall into this category. And there are still some good and identifiable obs there.
I don’t think that is the idea that is intended by making this distinction (though I agree that the decision to lump cultivated observations with defective ones under “casual” tends to imply such a devaluing of non-wild nature).
One of the main uses of iNat data (though certainly not the only one) is for biodiversity data. For this purpose it does indeed matter quite a bit whether the species is there because it was put there by humans, or because it occurred spontaneously and is or could potentially become part of a self-reproducing population. If humans have grown a plant under controlled conditions and put it somewhere, the presence of that plant does not tell us anything about ecosystem health or whether that plant would have survived at that location without human intervention, any more than the presence of a zebra at a zoo can tell us anything about what sort of mammal populations are supported by the local environment of the area outside the gates of the zoo. Knowing what populations are wild and which ones are not also shapes what measures we might take if we wish to help ensure that a particular population is able to continue to exist.
I appreciate your thoughtful reply.
I think as long as humans are excluded from the study of “nature,” we are missing out on a critical component of ecosystem health (or disturbance). Not collecting data on what humans collect & breed here on iNat eliminates an entire data set. But perhaps not relevant to the scientists using iNat? I don’t know, I’m not a scientist, just a thinker & observer.
Well, much of this data is probably already recorded in other ways and likely more systematically than they would be on iNat, albeit scattered across different sources (farmers and gardeners often keep records of what they plant, garden centers keep records of sales, state and city parks keep records of what they purchase and of landscaping planning proposals, etc.).
If we think of an iNat record as primarily representing occurrence data (x species was here on this date), records of non-wild organisms don’t typically offer new insights – they don’t really tell us anything that we didn’t know before. (It is not new information to record that there is a wallaby in the zoo because this is both intended and well documented; if that wallaby escapes and lives on its own for a time, its presence and movements outside of human control become more interesting. This similarly applies to a lot of plants planted by humans in gardens and public spaces.)
This is obviously going to be something of a spectrum – some captive/cultivated records will tell us more than others, particularly if they are part of an ecosystem that is not heavily managed and this ecosystem is being documented in a holistic manner or other details like interactions with other species or phenology are being recorded. On the other hand, a hothouse plant that was grown under artificial conditions, transplanted to a planter on someone’s balcony, and later discarded once it finished blooming is likely to be of interest, at best, to sociologists but of little relevance to botanists or ecologists.
So I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t ever observe cultivated plants – there may sometimes be good reasons for doing so – and I do think we need a better solution than lumping them with defective observations, but I do think it makes sense to maintain this basic distinction, imperfect as it is, and I also think it makes sense to structure the interface so as to encourage people to observe wild organisms rather than pampered ornamentals.
If I could, I would have marked this as the solution.
iNaturalist is a useful tool for its intended purpose. But one thing I have noticed repeatedly in the forums is that once some people have iNaturalist as their “hammer,” every problem looks to them like a nail. Better than trying to leverage one tool – no matter how good – for every use case, is to use the most appropriate tool for each use case.
As a horticulturist, I think it would be awesome to use the iNat technology for horticultural plant ID. There are many valuable uses beyond the ones in the original post.
I don’t think that is a task the iNat team should be burdened with. Furthermore, there are a lot of excellent people in the horticultural world who could identify the most valuable uses and the nuances required for each.
Zinnia variety ID based on flowers would work well. The thousands of tomato varieties not so well.
Turf species ID is very hard by eye, but iNat is eerily accurate already.
Ampelography (grape variety ID by leaf shape) is a dark art, on which iNat technology would shine brightly.
As a geneticist, thesis documenting the evolution of host and parasite species involving continental drift and many millions of years, what the general public has difficulty putting its arms around is the concept of species. It’s the very rare animal that can hybridize, and then, usually sterile. Why? Reproductive requirements, usually. Such specificity is needed to survive in nature: the wrong timing or pH, and fertilizing the egg may never happen, for instance. And a new trait had better not overturn the apple cart.
Many plants hybridize more easily, and yet: almost all of the cultivars you see are clonal repeats of some unusual genetic “sport”. They often have specific needs, or are even grafted, to keep them alive, and wouldn’t survive in nature; and offspring will often revert to the successful parent genome by losing the loser combinations. When something is so dependent upon human intervention for survival, it is not natural.
We do have co-dependent species in nature, and parasites-- but although your plant may brandish a distinctive genotype, we now know that inserting a helpful gene (e.g. in a human) doesn’t make a new species. iNat deals with nature and natural species. Your wish for better genetic characterization for plants is understandable, but it should start with knowing whether the plant is natural, or has been modified through cloning, artificial manipulations, or hybridization. The epithet of subspecies for hybrid boggles my mind: a hybrid does not breed true, so not a species.