However, if the plant in a pot is also a species that is only present in the area due to cultivation… personally, I’m going to consider it, and mark it, as captive / cultivated.
People like to make this, “But I didn’t plant this individual here, it got here on its own (from my potted plant one foot away),” distinction, which I believe is deeply unhelpful. By that reasoning, every spider plant in someone’s office window is 1 captive / cultivated plant and a couple dozen “wild” plants, and this makes absolutely zero ecological sense.
The USA also has just about half of all observations on inaturalist… there will naturally be more unmarked cultivated plants, but the proportion should be the same as all other places.
No, proportion is out of hand there, from what I’ve seen, iders there just don’t care about maring clearly planted things as so, that is a major problem.
Thank you!! This is great! I will be sharing it with iNatters I know, and the organizers of our CNC group in the Halifax Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia, Canada.
I really like the slides and the word choice of iNot. I am a bit less pleased with the notion that cultivated plants should not be on iNaturalist. iNaturalist has a “cultivated” tag and knowing about cultivated species can be valuable information about species interaction. Annotations of such interactions are being tagged.
Please continue recording “wild” cultivated species on iNaturalist, BUT use the cultivated tag for this.
This is a great tool for the participants of the challenge. I think I would just add more examples (particularly of trees rather than shrubs, bushes) that are iNat.
My biggest gripe about Inaturalist is that they default to “wild” and many observers to not even look at the check-offs below. I have curated thousands of observations in Costaceae and find that as much as 90% of the observations from outside the natural range of the species are checked as growing “wild” or not cultivated when you can clearly see in the photos that they are growing in urban areas outside the natural range and often in places where these tropical species could not possibly survive outdoors.
I have commented several times that the default needs to be changed to UNCHECK the “wild” designation and to require the observer (or reviewer) to check it before it becomes “research grade” and goes to GBIF.
I think it’s great and I just have two points about it.
First, it might be nice to add a note to the end letting people know that if they want to know what a cultivated/captive plant or animal is, there are other options like Seek and PlantSnap that don’t post the photos as observations.
Second, microorganisms under the scope. These are usually collected in the wild and brought back to a classroom or lab where the scope is kept. It’s fine to post them to iNat but users should set the location and date as the time and place where it was collected, not the lab.
That actually confuses me further, as I’ve been told on one of my other observations that “the only thing that matters is if they were planted by a human… that’s the iNat definition of ‘wild’.” Virtually all of the plants I’ve put in my yard have been self-sustaining for many years now.
Diana is saying planted flora = not wild, but offspring of planted flora (which you do not plant in turn) = wild.
Though I imagine if a parent plant in a garden bed drops seeds in the same garden bed, they’re going to seem pretty indistinguishable from the captive progenitors (especially if the mature plants are still present).
I deeply regret that iNat has chosen to call Not Wild plants Cultivated.
Since cultivated means something to people outside iNat, it is hard for us to remember that on Planet iNat, Cultivated means Not Wild. Here it doesn’t mean someone ‘cultivates’ that plant. A recipe for continual confusion.
The only plants in my garden that are cultivated, are potted roses, the lemon tree. Pots of bulbs I water sometimes. The rest fends for itself. For iNat I leave notes for - volunteer - not planted - ‘Wild’ for iNat.
People marking things as Unknown is also a big pain for identifiers. Do you think that the highest proportion of unknown identifications is from the USA, too? Do most unknown observations come from the USA?
I have no idea, I never id unknowns, they’re full of cultivated plants, proportion is likely the biggest in a small country with small number of observations unless somebody cleaned all of those.
Yes! It’s still odd to me that the trees that predated my parents’ house are not considered cultivated after my parent have been “cultivating” them as part of the lawn for decades, or that planted plants don’t become wild after being abandoned for decades & flourishing on their own.
It’s completely opposite to animals (and potentially other organisms?) on iNat:
In plants, captive/wild indicates origin.
In animals, captive/wild indicates current state.
But I’ve learned to accept that “cultivated” has a very specific use in botany and/or iNat as a technical term that differs from it’s not-jargon common usage, so I just accept it.
They don’t cut topiaries or anything, but the whole lawn gets watered, which I’m sure they trees benefit from in drought years, anddead branches are removed - mostly for the safety of humans, but I’m sure that probably benefits the trees too.
I’ve presented this exact scenario in the forum before (and possibly in the old Google groups) and been told they would still be wild. I don’t necessarily agree, so I just choose not to upload any of these residential live oaks.