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.
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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.
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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.
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That is a gray area. I was thinking more of plants that are typical, uncultivated weeds, like dandelions or purslane.
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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.
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Thank you so much for this, brilliant use of Google slides!
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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.
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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.
But awesome quiz! :)
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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.
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And it would be completely awful, 90%+ observations on iNat are wild, and people definitely won’t check the mark to call them so.
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