Ouch! Did you flag the ‘really nasty’ at the time?
1 Like
Yes I did and from memory it was dealt with. It was 3 or 4 years ago I think. I don’t mark a lot of things as casual and tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, as I know all too well how easily garden plants “escape”. However, when it’s in the UK and is a cactus in a pot sitting on someone’s kitchen worktop, it’s certainly not wild. There seems to have been a run of these recently
2 Likes
My sentiments exactly! Actually, I have noticed that it is a futile job to identify cultivated plants/domestic animals because real iNatters never post them without noting them as not wild. By “real users” I exclude school project members, who post some ten photos of cultivated plants and never come back or the users who for some reason post practically only cultivated plants. So I realized that there is no value in identifying non-wild unknowns and is damaging to leave them unmarked as non wild, because eventually some well wisher will come up, identify them, another well-wisher will support the ID and after some time I will be surprised by an article in Wikipedia that Lilium candidum is found naturalized in Lithuania (real case, based on iNat observation which has got RG and went to GBIF)…
3 Likes
I fully sympathize with issue of notifications. On the rare occasions that I do anything with Unknown, it is annoying to later have a bunch notifications for something that I have no interest in.
Depending on the time of year, a lot of new users may be students, many of whom will put as little effort as possible into their observations and will not engage at all in the future, regardless of guidance.
For me, if the user asked me why I ID’d the way I did, I’ll be more than happy to spend time explaining, but I’m not willing to spend extra time without knowing whether it is warranted.
4 Likes
On iNaturalist or in life, don’t let one bad apple prevent you from doing something useful.
5 Likes
See, for my goals, that’s the sort of observation where I’ll give a tip on how to get a photo of a plant in focus. I was totally frustrated at my seemingly inability to get certain observation attempts in focus. I learned how to improve my photos from tips given to me by identifiers.
I totally understand that the majority of new users might not ever return so how much time any of us spend dealing with problematic observations such as these is - in some ways - a form of hopeful optimism. And I think everyone has their sweet spot in utilizing their skill sets, patience levels, and current mood. Sweet spots are good. No apologies are needed if one’s sweet spot doesn’t include engaging in non-wild ambiguous observations.
But I would hope that wouldn’t involve having a negative attitude towards those observations or the people who make them. They are a different sort of observations than we hope to see but they were welcomed. I tell people, you learn by doing, if you make a mistake people will help you correct it, you can’t break anything, every mistake is fixable. We can’t invite people then get frustrated with their lack of instant understanding of what iNat is about and how it works.
(General thoughts not in reply to any one person)
I guess I’ve experienced a variety of group settings that involve a mix of type-A) everyone is welcome and type-B) some folks have been involved long enough to get really good at the activity involved.
Sometimes the longer-term, more skilled folk start to resent the newer folk. Maybe things have to be kept at a simpler level than they’d like. New folk don’t know all the social ‘rules and cues’. New folk might bring a different sort of energy than the longer term folks have established over the years
It can be a tricky balance to service new and old and keep the community vibrant, healthy, and growing. What I don’t think works well (in my opinion) is when the established group seemingly maintains an open invitation for others to join but, in reality, are not welcoming, not patient with new people, and expend little energy into helping new folk learn what they need to know. The worst is to openly get frustrated and irritated with them.
I tried square dancing in a phys-ed class for college and loved it. There was going to be an open square dance event on campus so I enthusiastically convinced my boyfriend to go. Once the music started, the amount of people who had never danced outnumbered those who knew how to dance well. It was kind of chaos on the floor but folks were really trying. Then an experienced dancer near me started yelling angrily at people giving the wrong hand to him and I thought ‘This isn’t fun at all. I thought square dancing was fun but this guy is mad and yelling at people.’ And even though I knew it would completely break our set, I walked off the floor. Over the years, I went on to dance, perform and even teach multiple forms of folk dance. But I still stay clear of square dance.
My wish for iNat going forward is for experienced folk and new folk to coexist together with the least amount of frustration and animosity between every one. Some people will stay in their lane of uber-users and interact little with newer folk. But staying in one’s lane can be done without feeling frustration towards others. Without feeling burdened by the weight of volunteering. In teaching situations where I’ve felt frustrated and burdened by circumstances mostly beyond my control (and new people making observations that aren’t in focus, aren’t clear about what they want, and don’t tick the right boxes aren’t going away)… I learned it was me who had to change something. Take a break, rethink my approach, adjust my mood.
I’m not advocating for anyone to necessarily change their process. But I earnestly would like to see more acceptance of new people and their chaotic ways! :-) I think we reach stages in our life when we get really good at stuff and it feels dang good. But we were all new folk at something at some point in our lives and, if want to grow, we will be at points in the future. We all love iNat. We want others to love it. Figuring out how that happens is the quest. :-)
“real iNatters” - ouch
7 Likes
Glad the placeholder project happened. I have also seen this while ID’ing unknowns. Or simply users marking “captive/cultivated” on clearly non-native species without considering that the individual may exist there of its own volition. Sometimes its VERY hard to be really sure that something is truly wild or not… At times I simply ask the observer. But I also sit and stew on Emma Marris’ book Wild Souls (Rambunctious Garden is also VERY good)
Hah!
That is a soil sample I was collecting for me colleague - a master’s student working to define marsh boundary ecotones on the Virginia Coast Reserve. It’s just sloppy smelly mud, but hammering the core into that mud was a hilarious mess. 
1 Like
I actually don’t leave any form of comment about proper use, flagging, or ID’ing one’s own observation upon first upload because of this. I have gotten only snarky responses even using cut-and-paste neutral/positive toned things…
Sidenote: I spoke to an MS student about this during the past summer – she visibly cringed when she saw me trying to leave a comment like this. It seems to me many many people (especially when brand new) read these as condescending and aggressive no matter how you structure the sentences. Now I just mark casuals, and ID unknowns (even endless repeats from the same users) without much comment.
5 Likes
I’m extremely grateful when people identify my years-old observations.
7 Likes
I’m glad to move those older observations forward! Especially if the observer is still active! The frustration for identifiers is how many of the observers have left iNaturalist. For old observations I shift to an assumption that the observer is gone, so I’ll mark obviously captive/cultivated organisms as such, even if they don’t have ID’s yet.
6 Likes
Maybe we need to redefine Casual. I am both a botanist and a gardener. In the Mojave Desert, what grows here and under what conditions? is a common question. Perhaps not what INaturalist was designed for, yet a useful source of data for the public.
I can understand why someone working on a species list of organisms that naturally occur in the wild for a natural resource management or research purpose would want to filter out horticultural plants. There is a handy wild/cultivated check box provided to filter out cultivated observations. As long as that is correctly checked, why can’t people have accurate identification of horticultural plants? What actually survives in local gardens is very different from what the horticultural industry sells locally. Microclimate specific data could save consumers thousands of dollars and encourage people who have given up on gardening.
3 Likes
It is not neccessarily eternal. Many users can leave their opinion in the data quality assessment. So the user just needs to click “organism is wild” to couterbalance the wrong opinion.
That said, I agree on principle: of course we always should look and read carefully before IDing or DQAing or Attributing.
2 Likes
This is because this sort of communication is not properly understood, I think.
Leaving a potted cactus without any further info is what the uploader “says”.
Clicking “cultivated” without further explanation is my response.
In my opinion, this conversation should then go on such as the fist user asking “why?”
If he does so, I will always be happy to provide all the infos in detail.
It is not really easy for a moderate user (and especially newbies) to understand that many people leaving IDs in huge amounts do have a regular day job (often as a biologist), but also a second trying extra job on iNat nobody is even paying for. In this light, it is not in poor taste to just leave a DQA (or an ID for that matter) without any further explanation, but it is a present actually. In many cases it is even professional work performance provided for free.
As I said somewhere else: if someone provides an ID or a DQA, even without further explanation, first of all a “Thank You” would be in order.
5 Likes
Guess what is is, before you push it to Not Wild.
Guess ? No.
2 Likes
I’ve only had one observation dismissed as “casual.” I disagree with that assessment but can’t be bothered to fight about it. It was called “casual” because the crabs in the photo had been captured and strung up for market. They were not captive crabs; they were not living in captivity. They were wild crabs that wre captured. There’s a difference. If every captured animal was written off as “casual,” hundreds of thousands of fish observations would be tossed.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/228942973
It is quite interesting to see how they are captured and how they are packed together to make a “sarta” (a string of crabs). I went out with a crab lady to see how it’s done. You have to put your arm down the crab hole up to the shoulder. I managed to catch four.
https://www.facebook.com/DocTvEcuador/videos/va-armar-una-sarta-de-cangrejos-vivos/819884062379193/
But you would not want to see a sarta of crabs as the ‘wild’ taxon picture ?
It could be a gray zone case, however imho this is not wild according to the iNaturalist peculiar definition - the crabs do not look like they landed in that place (a fish market?) at that moment out of their own will. And at any rate, they are unlikely to be freed back any time soon :) (a difference with the “insect momentarily kept in hand/in a box just for the needs of the photo” case)
It makes for a great picture, I wouldn’t mind having it for taxon photo - it is quite detailed and eye-pleasing.
I wouldn’t choose it as a taxon photo. The actual taxon photos of this species are better. However, compare it to this photo that was taken on a dock in almost exactly the same place, but was not classified as “casual.”
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/61811397
Or this photo from a bit further south:
There is no need to fight. Just mark it as wild yourself, there can be more than one vote/opinion in the DQA.
I respect the point of view, but it isn’t my opinion.
Out of self-preservation.
Otherwise I’d have to go and push thousands upon thousands of capured fish back to casual. 