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…

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 .

The plant taxonomy iNat uses is based on POWO https://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:329401-2#children Wild Species, but not cultivars. iNat also does not do dog breeds, for example.

[image] theresephillips: This can also help nurseries on understand changes and patterns in blooming and seeding seasons. 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 …

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 s…

[image] becksnyc: at what point did that happen 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 bea…

Did you vote on - Cultivated should be Needs ID? 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 c…

[image] becksnyc: I think the very concept that humans and the species they cultivate purposefully are not part of nature is absurd. 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…

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 rele…

[image] becksnyc: Not collecting data on what humans collect & breed 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 p…

Garden Plants Taxon

General

arboretum_amy June 29, 2025, 8:58pm 4

Although it is not related to your suggestion, if you have interest in cultivated plants, you may be interesting in voting on this feature request: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/make-captive-cultivated-not-automatically-no-id-needed/112

Topic		Replies	Views
Value of public Garden adding cultivated species General question	16	1265	January 31, 2020
Relevance of cultivated species observations General	53	3338	August 25, 2022
Is a wild collected plant with a known origin, cultivated in a Botanical Garden, only hobby quality or of scientific interest? General	37	2035	March 22, 2023
Cultivated/wild : the false dilemma of nature vs culture Nature Talk cultivated	62	1419	July 16, 2026
Uploading garden plants as wild: The potential for false naturalization data to spread General	79	3797	September 19, 2023

Garden Plants Taxon

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