- garden plant that is reproducing on its own and spreading outside of the intended gardening area
The quote from iNat help page.
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I suppose if anyone moves into a house, they’re supposed to know where the prior owner intended all the plants to be. And I can make any plant wild by changing my mind, “Nope, I don’t really want that plant there any more.” :-)
I think if we define “intended” more broadly, though, it works well enough. If you’re in a typical American suburb, the entire suburb is intended as a lawn / garden area. If your plants make it a quarter mile down the road into an unmanaged or ± natural area, OK, it’s escaped. If it just makes it from one lawn to another lawn, nope.
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Based on the iNat guidelines and thousands of discussions, I consider plants that I upload cultivated if they re-seed in a designated, irrigated area (even if the seeds dispersed on their own like these beans), but they are “wild” once they start growing in the sidewalk and driveway.
Yes, that’s fair! Lucky for me, I’ve had the opposite flow of plants - from natural area to garden - like the Descurainia you helped with earlier.
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There’re rules and we work by them, this was discussed before, there’s a difference between a bunch of plants propogating side by side and them spreading outside of planted area, they’re not planted anymore, you can skip observing them, but please don’t mark others’ observations that fit wild criteria as cultivated. iNat rules are different from something used outside of it, escaped duck is not wild by any ornithological community, it is wild on iNat.
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The rules have some ambiguity. I choose to interpret that ambiguity to make the data more objectively characterizable and meaningful.
Whenever I decide to focus on a genus that is often cultivated, the first step is always the same: try to get the garden plants out of the way. It’s tiring and annoying. I’m sure it matters to the person whose garden it is whether they put a particular individual plant there or it popped up from a parent a few meters away, but I can’t really imagine it is important to anyone else.
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Luckily for you, my default practice with regard to Alburquerque is “ignore”. :-)
Albuquerque urban plant observations in general are quite messy and there is plenty of gray area with undeveloped lots and “wild” gardens and close up pictures without context.
I also don’t blame any new users who don’t understand the system and nuances. People just want to know what a weird flower is on an app and aren’t aware of the larger picture. You and I are in the extreme of users in New Mexico and we know the “struggle” of plant identifiers. I know every plant in my yard and how it got there out of necessity of fighting City code enforcement, out of curiosity, and because I have planted the majority of them myself to attract pollinators.
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I understand rules can be interpreted differently but please be careful with this. If I went out of my way to specify that something is not captive, and somebody said it is because that would make the data more “meaningful”, I would become upset and feel a little disrespected/undermined. Regardless of if that’s the intent. Or if somebody flagged a comment that said something along those lines, I would probably see it as a reasonable flag because it can be a little hurtful to come on the scene and implement your preferred approach on someone else’s observation.
I have no problem with differing views and ways of using the site, but all I am saying is be careful in your wording and be extra courteous with others if you know you’re disagreeing over something like this. Because when the rules are ambiguous, it can be argued in your favor as well as not. And because it’s unfortunate when people feel hurt or minimized or unheard, especially on a site where we all have a common interest and love for something.
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Nor I, but there’s also a small minority who deliberately mark captive / cultivated observations as “wild” for various reasons. Some of the posts in this thread can be interpreted as encouraging that behavior.
I do try not to be a jerk. I might even succeed!
Agreed, and this is not unique to any “side” in this context.
It occurs to me that having a filter to exclude towns / cities would solve most of the problem from my point of view as well as avoiding most of the potential for conflict. I expect there are existing GIS data sources that would make this easy to implement. I’ll probably make a feature request for this. For my local area, I did it manually by creating a custom location, but this is not a great solution—since you can only search by one location at a time, it’s not very flexible.
You can search for any number of locations at once.
Yes, I’ve just been poking at the current functionality. So far as I can tell, I can search by multiple 'place_id’s, but these are treated as if joined by “or”. This doesn’t allow me to exclude towns / cities, or at least I’ve not been able to find a way to do so. If you know of one, I’d appreciate hearing it!
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/search+urls#exclude
e.g. Illinois obs excluding the very populous Cook and Lake counties:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?not_in_place=1859,429&place_id=35&subview=map
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Thanks! I assumed it would be in the API documentation, so I was looking there.
And I think I’ve found the appropriate data to create a custom place for all U.S. towns / cities.
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