Several of the ideas that you mention are something an ecologist may want to consider, but do not dictate an observation’s status as wild/captive on iNat. For instance, this statement:
is not true - knowing an organism’s status as established or not is not necessary to determine whether an observation is wild or captive, though that information could be useful in some contexts.
Additionally, in this instance,
it isn’t required to know if the organisms form new populations or not or persist through the winter. This info is not required to make a determination under the guidelines. I think that the guidelines can be challenging to use in some cases and do include some gray areas (mostly because we only have a picture to make a determination about a more complex situation), but, given past conversations, there do not seem to be alternative criteria that are significantly clearer/easier to adjudicate.
For instance, assessing whether a population is established or capable of establishing would certainly create more gray area as a criterion in my mind, as humans are notoriously poor at predicting which species will become invasive/established. This would not be a consistently actionable criterion in my opinion.
I definitely understand that the definition of wild on iNat does not always correspond to what some people think of as “wild”, but I think that many of the conversations around wild/captive designations (including this one) often boil down to some people disagreeing with or not liking iNat’s definitions, which is a different issue than using the criteria to judge whether a given observation is captive/wild within the guidelines.
The official word from site staff is that escapees from captivity count as wild, as “wild” refers to the individual, not the population. If you find any observations like this, I encourage you to vote them “wild” and add them to my project: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/escapees-from-captivity
@mathieu_fr – Your preference to define “wild” as “being part of a reproducing population in the area” is entirely reasonable. However, iNaturalist uses a different definition (the individual got where it is by itself and not because humans put it there) for what I consider two good reasons.
First, this is a citizen science project and many of the citizens involved have no clue about whether the individual they’re photographing is part of a wild population. It’s hard enough excluding their photos of potted plants or parrots in cages. Using a broad definition of “wild” is easier than explaining why a free, wandering turtle doesn’t count.
Second, and more important to me, if you exclude individuals not currently known to be part of a reproducing population in the area, you exclude two important categories of organisms that would meet anybody’s definition of wild. Maybe there is a small, wild, reproducing population of the organism and biologists just don’t know about it yet. Or maybe the organism is part of the first generation of what will become a well established wild population. I consider it important to record organisms that start wild populations, to track the growth of such populations, but obviously we can’t know that’s what we are seeing until later.
The iNaturalist definition of “wild” does cause extra work for you in your searches. I’m sorry that is true. Nonetheless, I consider the broader definition useful for iNaturalist.
As to your examples, I agree that every one of those domestic sheep observations in Europe must be captive. In my limited experience with them, I found that domestic sheep have only one real skill – dying in new and stupid ways. However, don’t count that one Snapping Turtle out! That species is invasive in areas of North America and all you need is one female that lays eggs (which they sometimes do without fertilization) and you could have a population.