House plants and zoo animals?

[mmmmbugs]

Hi all,
I’m new to iNaturalist and am pretty excited to start identifying my own and others’ photos.
I’ve noticed some people posting pictures of their house plants and even of a mongoose from a zoo exhibit.
Is iNaturalist intended for this kind of use?
Thanks-
AvdB

[mtank]

There’s no reason why it can’t be used this way. There’s a flag that can be used to mark an observation as “captive”. This means that it’s easy to exclude non-wild observations from any searches, and they don’t show up in the distribution maps for that species.

If you find an observation marked “Casual”, one of the likely reasons is that it is not wild. On the flip side, if you see an observation that is clearly a captive one, and it is marked “Needs ID” or “Research Grade”, you can flag it as captive yourself to help out with the data quality. I often do this where the person posting the observation has forgotten, or doesn’t know to do it.

[bug_girl]

Welcome to the forum!

[kitty12]

Welcome to iNaturalist and the iNat Forum!

[arboretum_amy]

Welcome! Identifying is a crucial service for the community and I’m so glad to hear you are giving it a try. Don’t hesitate to ask questions or search previously created forum topics if you run into anything else that needs clarification.