Help with Hong Kong posts?

General
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A whole lot of observations are being posted from Hong Kong, probably by students. As the last time (2019?), most of the observations are from gardens, arboretums, and streets, though there are more insects, weeds, and European Tree Sparrows than I remember.

If you can identify common cultivated plants of conservatories and botanic gardens, or common tropical street plantings, would you identify some of these observations?

If you can provide a name, remember to tag the plant as “cultivated” if appropriate. (Before it has a name, tagging it as cultivated will just make it invisible to most people.)

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I mentioned it here, I think it makes sense using that topic now when Friday is so close.

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Given the influx, having this posted twice is probably not a bad thing!

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I must add that even if you can’t identify the organism (and assuming it’s obviously cultivated of course), it would probably be best to mark it as such anyways.

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Technically, you should mark posts of cultivated plants “cultivated” whether they’re identified or not. However, if you do that to unidentified plants, they may never be identified, or not for years. The people who post these wants a response while they’re still looking for one. Therefore, I prefer to mark them “cultivated” only after at least one good identification.

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Time flies, November again already! I learned some HK urban plants last year, let’s see if I remember…

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How does one deal with observations like this? https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/100850600 (That user has so many that are similar). I suppose they still count as “cultivated”?

Edit: God this is frustrating. Especially when I feel the plant ID’s are wrong or too ambitious but I just lack the knowledge to confirm.

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Yeah, 99% of plants they post are cultivated.

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I’m just mindful that there are non-cultivated plants that thrive relatively well in urban settings and I wouldn’t want to mark those as casual. Also for large trees maybe they were there for a long time so I feel its difficult to tell. I feel this is a topic that has been discussed here before but I’m late to jump the bandwagon.

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I wouldn’t bother too much about that, there’re users who upload each thing in 20 different observations, imo it’s a bigger problem than having one tree marked cultivated when we don’t know, most trees idn’t grow by themselves and this group is really focused on potted plants, there’s a minimal chance they’ll observe a real wild tree in urban setting.

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It does look like one of the schools (the only school?) submitting the observations has a forest next to it.

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Can you show which project in particular? I’m from Hong Kong so I’m familiar with the overall geography.

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I just identified a few pages of Hong Kong Unknowns - I work quite slowly though, so it will take me a while to do the several hundred that remain. First time I’ve seen things that are quite obviously not organisms (presumably since it’s taking a while for people to notice and bump them to Casual). I’ll keep working on it.

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Maybe, I didn’t check all of observations (I’m having frustration problems seeing it all), accounts I checked visited some place with tons of pots.

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Recognized some familiar ornamentals. Pentas, etc.

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There’s no project listed, it looks like the class is just submitting hundreds of observations without a project.

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oh yes I have seen those. I just assume they did not join a particular project.

EDIT: but I will not rule out the possibility that some are actually interested in using iNat as a means to pique their curiosity.

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Here’s an observation from that school. If you look at the map satellite view you can see there is a decent-sized woods next to it: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/100932043

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When I mark casual 10 observations of cultivated plants, another 20 pop up. This is almost like a never ending task lol.

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Sometimes cultivated plants are labeled, but those labels themselves may be wrong! Here’s Goeppertia insignis which I have to identify like a thousand times. However, there’s labels as “Zebra plant”, a related species (Goeppertia zebrina), or “Columbia star” which I don’t even know where that came from. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/100695839

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