I come across many situations like the following: observation at Magnoliopsida (dicots) because the first poster has put an ID of, say, Dahlia pinnata on an (obviously cultivated) garden rose and a second IDer has corrected to Rosa. I’ll add a supporting ID of Rosa, but then the question becomes, do I mark this as ‘not wild’? If I do, the observation becomes casual, taking it out of the pool of records that most IDers look at, and making it more likely to stay at Magnoliopsida for quite some time. If I don’t, a third IDer is more likely to put a third Rosa ID and get the community ID to Rosa, but if they don’t mark it as ‘cultivated’ then that’s yet another plant record that is ‘verifiable’ when it should be marked ‘cultivated’, and I’ve just punted the marking of this plant as ‘not wild’ to someone else when I could have easily done it myself.
This is not a feature request (there are already interesting threads for that, e.g. here), nor is it a post about what ‘captive/cultivated’ means (iNat’s position is clear enough for me, and I don’t want this to be about various edge cases and gray areas). My question (for those who regularly ID plants in developed areas) is, given the current way that iNat handles the ‘captive/cultivated’ tag, what would you do in the above situation? Or, more generally, how important do you feel it is for plant IDers to mark others’ observations as ‘cultivated’ when IDing, if they are reasonably confident that that is the case?
I mark cases like this as cultivated with extreme prejudice. It’s up to the observer to keep up with their observations. I don’t see it as identifiers’ responsibility to “rescue” casual higher-taxon observations that could potentially end up as casual lower-taxon observations.
My view may be colored by seeing thousands upon thousands of observations every year by unwilling high school and college students who were compelled to use iNaturalist by their instructors, and who don’t show the slightest interest in what happens after they push “submit.”
I could imagine seeing it differently if the predominant users were interested enthusiasts, but at least in my area that is decidedly not the case.
I always mark such plants (or whatever) as Not Wild. Since iNaturalist’s priority is wild organisms, I think it is important to move captive or cultivated observations out of the main Needs ID stream as quickly as possible. If horticulturalists want to look at and further refine the IDs of cultivated plants, they can easily find them; the observations are not deleted from iNat. As you noted, this saves the time of other identifiers as well.
If it is obviously a Garden Plant - yes - mark as Not Wild as soon as you notice.
If you want to ‘be kind to a newbie’ then add your ID first.
In your example 3 identifiers have already done the Be Kind. It is Not Wild.
Thanks, these responses give me reassurance that I’m not going against community norms about when to mark things as cultivated. I guess I see so many IDs of (what to me seem pretty clearly) cultivated plants, many by very prolific IDers, and many even reaching research grade, that I wanted to see if there was some unwritten consensus about waiting to mark something as ‘cultivated’ until it reaches a lower taxon.
I get the impression that many IDers feel it is mostly on the observer to mark their own observations as ‘cultivated’ (and sometimes write a (mostly unheeded) note asking them to do so), but if the observer feels strongly that their observation is wild, it’s just one click to counteract someone else’s casual vote, no?
If it’s blatantly cultivated I’ll mark it cultivated and move on (maybe an ID if I know it).
If it’s a bit more ambiguous I’ll mark it cultivated and leave a comment, if I’m wrong they can vote against or say. In very ambiguous cases (stuff that’s barely known as a garden escape but seems ‘wild’) I’ll usually ask first.
I ID’d quite a few Spigelia marilandica earlier this year across the eastern U.S. and Canada. If I could tell that they were clearly in someone’s mulched flower bed, I marked them as captive.
For another example:
If I see Rosa multiflora in a mulched flowerbed, evenly spaced from other plants, or on a trellis, it’s captive.
If I see Rosa multiflora growing anywhere outside a flowerbed, it’s a wild invasive in my eyes.
I agree. If people want to identify casual observations they can do so, but everyone should be striving for accurate data quality. @jonsense you shouldn’t feel guilty about marking a clearly cultivated plant as such.
Thanks @tiwane, and I am indeed now taking the time to mark cultivated plants as ‘not wild’ when I ID, especially since I do now realize that even if I can’t help with the ID, removing them from the ‘wild’ pool does have a significant effect on data quality.
For instance, I’ve started doing some native gardening, and I like using the iNat explore page to find out what’s in my area, what type of habitats these plants are found in, etc. It’s a fantastic resource, but I’ve come to realize that many ‘attractive’ native plants that seem like they are local, are, if I actually zoom in on the distribution map in my area, mostly planted in urban and suburban yards, in arboretums and botanic gardens, and are absent from the woods and trails and nature preserves.
One instance of this is Spigelia marilandica, which @jhousephotos actually mentioned. I planted a couple last fall under the impression that it was native to my area (mid-atlantic US; it has “marilandica” in the name after all!), but I have not (yet) seen it growing in the wild, and of the 23 verifiable observations in my area (19 RG), maybe one of them is truly wild. The rest, if you actually look at their locations and pictures, are pretty clearly in yards and gardens. So, now I have a policy to mostly only plant something if I’ve actually personally seen it growing locally in the wild (the Spigelia marilandica is very handsome, though!).
Today I reviewed some 300 plant observations, and marked more than 50 as “not wild”. Hardly ever do I give an id for such observations (even if it does not yet have an id at all), but recently I learned that also cultivated plants with a “community id” might be used for training computer vision, so I give an id nowadays when the current id is obviously wrong.
Be sure to mark planted plants as “captive/cultivated” when you upload observations of them. You can also do so after uploading by clicking the “thumbs down” next to “Organism is wild” in the Data Quality Assessment section at the bottom of this page on the website. Thanks!
And from time to time, I also check cultivated plants : some of them are actually wild, but the uploader has ticked a box when uploading. It seems that, in some languages, the box « the organism is not wild » is wrongly translated as « the organism is wild », and some people answer « yes » because the organism is wild, but they are actually saying that the organism is not wild. I am still waiting for answers about the language that I have not yet been able to identify.
I always try to mark things as “not wild” when I come across them. If the current community ID is blatantly wrong I’ll try to add a correction while I’m at it, but if it’s already been knocked back to a higher taxon level I won’t generally bother. I actually get a little irritated when I see multiple identifiers have contributed to an obviously captive observation but none of them took the time to mark it as such.
I’m personally pretty conservative when it comes to when I mark someone else’s stuff as captive. When I first started on iNat, I was frustrated by annotators coming along and marking my stuff captive when it wasn’t captive, and I guess that’s sort of tainted my view of the situation. At the time, as a new user, I didn’t know how to search my observations to see what people had marked captive. Since then I’ve figured out how to do these things, and I’ve gone around and corrected the ones that needed correcting- “no, that isn’t a tomato plant in a garden; it’s a volunteer growing in a ditch”, “yes, this pinned moth has the data of my original capture, so it’s not captive”, “I know this tree looks to be planted in this park, but I know for a fact the tree predates the park and was growing there naturally before the park was formed”, etc., etc., etc… I add comments preemptively these days when I upload anything that I’m worried is going to be “captive-voted”, but new users have no idea this is a good practice. I really don’t want to be “that guy” that makes assumptions about other people’s observations and “casual-grades” them by mistake. I know it’s up to everyone to monitor their own observations and correct the annotators’ mistakes, but since DQA changes don’t give notifications, new users probably have no idea that these changes are being made to their observations. I sure didn’t.
As I’ve said before on the forum, I’d rather 50 captive observations be mistakenly marked wild than 5 wild observations be mistakenly relegated to captive. So if it’s really really obvious that something is cultivated, I’ll mark it, but if I can come up with any scenario in my mind in which the plant is actually a volunteer, I leave it. Even if it’s something like a small shrub commonly used in landscaping growing from mulch, am I really sure that that individual plant was planted there, as opposed to being seeded from a larger nearby cultivated shrub? Heck, any time I find a Japanese Maple or Field Maple planted around here, it takes minimal effort to find a “volunteer” growing under it that counts as a wild organism, even though the parent tree was cultivated. Why would I assume that the one an observer posts is the cultivated one as opposed to a volunteer? I know this isn’t how a lot of identifiers do things, but that’s my personal philosophy. At the very least, I hope anyone adding a captive vote leaves a comment so the observer knows what’s been done and can promptly counter-vote if necessary.
No, I don’t. As an identifier I can only work with the info available to me. If the observer has not spelt out for us - this one is a volunteer so Wild - that is their silent choice, which is on them to resolve.
Why do you say this ? I find the Not Wild on the distribution map an irritation to resolve.