I sometimes mark garden plants as casual but there are just too many to do it consistently (yes, University College Dublin, I’m looking at you, along with all your recent photos of bike parks, road junctions and litter bins). I don’t give the observer an explanation. They can work it out, or they could read the help notes.
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Yes, nowadays I definitely make a note explaining the habitat (and make sure to have an ‘establishing shot’ of that plant in that habitat) when I make an observation for any plant that is more often cultivated that not in my area, especially in those very few cases in which I’ve actively voted against the automatic iNat ‘Not Wild’ vote. Of course, it’s not automatically clear to those new to iNat (or new to the plants they’re observing, actually) what makes something more or less likely to be planted, and why that might even matter in the first place.
There will always be error, going both ways, and actually this already feels like the baseline (way more mistaken wild than mistaken captive), in the sense that ’wild’ is the default for every observation unless someone changes it. There are certain taxa (where 80%+ of current observations are ’Not Wild’) that get automatically marked ’Not Wild’ by iNat, and yes, that means a small number of actually wild observations get auto-voted casual, but I think that’s tolerable if it gets the observations of species that are overwhelmingly cultivated to be properly marked.
For me, this is simply too high of a bar for deciding whether something is cultivated or not. Sure, any given hosta or crepe myrtle or japanese maple (full-grown, not saplings) from someone’s yard that gets posted could have potentially seeded from a parent plant, but is it likely? Being that conservative with marking common garden plants as ‘cultivated’ makes it impossible to get a true sense of how often they actually escape cultivation, which is important, especially for those who have an interest in whether a given garden plant is a risk for becoming invasive in an area.
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I feel no guilt marking organisms that are or appear to be captive/cultivated and you shouldn’t either. Lots of people don’t take the time to mark or forget (I’ve done that myself!) and wanting to get an ID is no reason to delay marking it appropriately. I know of several people that go through casuals to give ID’s so it’s even more a reason to have no guilt.
One other thing to appease my personal anxieties (and I don’t know if lots of people do this) is I make sure to take the time to look through the observation to ensure there isn’t a comment/note indicating special situations (like a volunteer plant growing in a garden bed, etc). This makes me feel like I’ve done my due diligence to ensure fairness in bringing something down to casual.
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The observer could also have said, this is for the bee on the flower, or whatever.
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Not sure how I feel about this. Some plants are virtually always seeded or propagating beyond their original patch after the first year, but they tend to get marked cultivated anyway if they appear to be in a garden. In those cases human thinning of new organisms is actually probably all that is preventing them from escaping. Is ‘being where a human intended it to be by virtue of the human not having deliberately destroyed it’ a subset of being planted?
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The iNat captive/cultivated statement I linked to above treats as wild the example of a “garden plant that is reproducing on its own and spreading outside of the intended gardening area” (emphasis mine), which implies to me that if it’s reproducing within the intended garden area, it’s cultivated.
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Better yet, add an initial ID of “Bees.” Then, the flower identifiers won’t even see it.
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If the observation is recent and unidentified, I don’t usually mark it cultivated. If it has even one “good” identification (and “Rosa” is a good ID, in my opinion), it mark it captive. With old observations I’m ruthless. Yes I understand why I should probably be ruthless with all observations, but I I think that sometimes the observer actually does want to know what he’s looking at and I sympathize with that. Well, usually I do. I tend to get ruthless with major bioblitzes and with what’s obviously a whole classroom of students wandering around photographing the same individual plants.
When I do mark a plant cultivated, I write something like, “I assume this plant is cultivated (growing in a garden). If it is wild please comment and I will change how I marked it.” Occasionally people actually do comment. I don’t like the idea of commenting and coming back later to mark it cultivated; I want to see the observation only once.
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Some obs are more equal than others. Interesting plant, with good clear pictures - I may tag someone in to help. But then I will comment (garden plant), so they can decide upfront - no, I don’t ID if it isn’t Wild.
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When the user uploads an observation, at least from the apps, one of the drop-down menus says Captive/Cultivated. The observer must either select Yes or No to upload. So if it’s been uploaded from the apps, and it’s not marked as Captive/Cultivated, that’s because the user uploaded it with the menu explicitly set to “No” on the Captive/Cultivated question. That is not silence, in my opinion. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t have been mistaken. But again, as a new user, I thought that selecting “No” on the captive/cultivated menu meant that I was telling the annotators “this is a wild individual”. The fact that annotators don’t take that into account and assume a lack of comment confirming that menu item constitutes “silence” on my part was not intuitive.
I think the reason so many errors happen on this front may be that the apps default the Captive/Cultivated menu to “No” unless you change it. So maybe some new users just don’t know what it even means. But what’s the point in even having that menu on the app if the identifiers and annotations entirely ignore what I select on it and put in their own votes based entirely on what they see in my pictures?
I select “wild” when I upload, someone annotates it as “captive”, and then they tell me “you never explained that it was wild” as an excuse for getting it wrong? That seems very strange to the “uninitiated” in how iNat workflows tend to go.
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Perhaps a “can’t be determined” option would help a lot. I get that this would be difficult to implement because captive/wild is so tied to the RG/Casual status of an observation… but if the goal is to know if a plant is actually escaping cultivation and all you have is a picture of a plant with no written history as to how it got there, the most honest answer to “was it planted there by a person?” is “I don’t know”. So I personally just refrain from putting in a vote on that question. If someone else marks it captive, I’m not going to counter-vote it. And if someone votes for Wild, I’m not going to counter that either. I just don’t know, and my current practice is to remain agnostic and not touch an annotation that I have no knowledge of.
Everyone has their standard though. How sure do you need to be in your mind that something was planted to mark it as such? 25% (I think it’s wild, but I’m suspicious), 50% (I really think this could go either way), 51% (I think it’s ever so slightly more likely than not), 75%, 99%, 100%? It’s like the various standards of evidence in law- it sounds like most people go with “preponderance of the evidence” as their standard for this while I go with “beyond a reasonable doubt”. There’s no specific guidance about this, so I think it’s everyone for themself for what they go with.
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I agree, those can be annoying. And I certainly wouldn’t say to never vote them captive if it’s very clear that that’s what they are.
As a researcher though, if I have two options:
- A dataset which is a little over inclusive and has some data I’m going to throw out because I decide the observations aren’t wild
- A dataset which is a little under inclusive and is missing some datapoints which I would have included if I’d seen them.
I’d take option 1. The fact that Casual-ing an observation makes it less likely to ever be seen means I think there should be a high bar for doing so.
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Perhaps the difference between a stray moth, and the deluge of ‘wild’ plants in iNat, which are clearly in a garden, a manicured park, or a blooming pot - then we set the bar lower.
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And I suppose if one disagrees strongly with my view on this topic, if nothing else, keep in mind that I’m like this because I got soured to the idea of frequent captive-voting because of folks making mistakes on my own observations as a new user. So the practical reason to hold back sometimes may be just that mistakes in this area may inadvertently create a new generation of identifiers with my same bad take. ;) haha
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No - you make me realise that I set the bar differently for wild or not plants, to the way I set it for animals. I am unlikely to do wrong by your data set.
This is not true. I can’t speak for the iOS app, but for both the android app and the web uploader, there is a box that can be checked to indicate “captive/cultivated” but no option to explicitly mark as “wild”. It is easy enough to simply scroll past this box. Wild is therefore the default and not an indication that the observer consciously considered whether the observation was wild or not.
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I also think there are ways in which the current system could be improved, but those probably come with tradeoffs I haven’t thought of, plus there are already other threads about that, so I’ll leave off that topic.
Certainly agree that everyone has their own standard and level of comfort with marking things ‘not wild’, and it’s been good to get those different perspectives in this thread. I actually had the same thought process as you about ‘likeliness’ of cultivation (I think mine’s around 80-85% sure when I’ll mark something as ‘not wild’!). The law analogy is a good one; I’m definitely a ‘preponderance of evidence’ person on this topic, but I don’t begrudge those with a different standard.
Yes, great point. Of the now nearly 100 million worldwide plant observations on iNat, 10% of those are marked ‘cultivated’ (and I’d estimate what, another 5-10% unmarked?). For insects, the number of ‘captive’ is around 0.2% of the total.
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Absolutely, we should always mark cultivated/domesticated organisms as such if there is good evidence for that. HOWEVER, a lot of the angst expressed here will disappear when iNat applies rigorous logic to definition of RG. It is NOT the view of the wider iNat community, especially the vast majority of urban dwellers, that only ‘wildness’ constitutes legitimacy in a research and science context. International subscribers (and GBIF) have argued for some years now that to be ‘scientific’ we must distinguish and separate 2 completely unrelated parameters - wild/cultivated on one hand, and correct ID on other. We have laid out the many research and applied science purposes that exist within cultivated life, so to relegate such observations to ‘casual’ is not only illogical but is insulting and demotivates observers from correct labelling. Don’t get me wrong, i value wilderness greatly, but we have the means to legitimately record this - we aren’t going to lose that distinction. But we do lose credibility as a science provider. I look forward to the avalanche of responses :-).
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I fight for that with you - there is an open feature request to permit Not Wild to Need ID. Interesting that GBIF agrees.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/make-captive-cultivated-not-automatically-no-id-needed/112 From Feb 2019 with 149 votes
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