How are observations automatically flagged as non-wild?
Browsing observations I see that some species are automatically flagged as cultivated. I think it is based on the percentage of observations flagged by users as cultivated so that the site “decides” that all the observations must be managed that way. As regard one could pimpoint both pros and cons of this aspect but I do not intend to discuss this here.
Anyway, as far as Italy is concerned, I see that there are still many taxa that are extremely unlikely found as escapee and that are not recognized by the site as non-wild. For example all Magnolias, almost all Citrus species (except C. trifoliata), Trachelospermum jasminoides, Hypericum calycinum, Jacaranda mimosifolia, Plumbago auriculata, Pelargonium spp., just to cite few, are only occasionally found by botanists as casual aliens here in Italy. So it is unlikely that they are found in the wild by newbies and, indeed, all observations or 99% refers to cultivated plants.
Thus, I would be curious to know how the automatic flagging really works.
When it was added it was said it marks those observations if majority of obs of the same taon around the spot are also cultivated, it’s pretty vague, but those you say are not marked because now there’re too many that are needs id or even RG.
“The system will vote that the observation is not wild/naturalized if there are at least 10 other observations of a genus or lower in the smallest county-, state-, or country-equivalent place that contains this observation and 80% or more of those observations have been marked as not wild/naturalized.”
Link to @thebeachcomber’s source, for future reference: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#quality
Thanks but I still have some doubts (maybe I am still not getting something).
For example, for Italy (place id: 6973) there were 567 casual observations of the genus Punica and 14 non-casual (of which three cultivated and 11 growing in a natural environment). Maybe other examples could be made.
On the opposite, I uploaded an observation of a cultivated Bougainvillea and it immediately was flagged by the site. Oddly, another observations from Sicily (maybe is Sicily considered an area distinct from Italy?) with a very imprecise position (more than 300 km) was kept as wild.
Well, I’d expect that the Italian equivalents of counties are either regioni or province, so you would need to look at these levels. Not sure how imprecise observations are calculated
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