Yeah, it doesn’t seem too much is done, but imo if you want to call something cultivated, you’re free to do it so.
Just to clarify: I’ll call it cultivated in my head, but I DO follow iNat’s definition (even when I don’t agree with it) when IDing.
I may think some photo of a tree in a city park, surrounded by grass trimmed to the height of a putting green, is as cultivated as the rest of the landscape, but when the observer says it predated the park, I let it go and don’t mark it down to casual.
Sure, I mean on your own observations!
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I understand the frustration that many cultivated observations get added as wild, but I think the alternative of defaulting everything to cultivated is worse. Better “onboarding” and user education could help that, and would actually be really useful for many iNat data quality issues. [Maybe we can get @anneclewis’s quiz automatically presented to new iNat users?]
So long as the quantities are not huge, it’s not especially onerous for a knowledgeable person to work through a particular taxon geographically in the Identify interface and press “X” a bunch of times to move observations from wild to cultivated.
One bonus that you might see from doing that work is that iNat will start to pick up on your efforts and automatically handle future cultivated observations (at least those in relatively densely reported areas). Here’s how that works.
- The system will vote that the observation is not wild/naturalized if there are at least 10 other observations of a genus or lower in the smallest county-, state-, or country-equivalent place that contains this observation and 80% or more of those observations have been marked as not wild/naturalized.
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It’s okay to add cultivated plants to iNat; just ensure they get marked as “Not Wild” when creating an observation.
I believe there are some botany researchers on iNat who are interested in the occurrence certain cultivated plants.
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Good idea but… in some (or many) cases the educators have turned out to be the first to be educated on what iNat is and on the issue of captive/cultivated organisms.
To be more precise, I see a certain number of new projects created by new users with none or very few observations. The observations are added to these projects in one/few days by users who are active one day (duress). Often the quality is very poor with blurry and poorly representative photos and often DQA is badly managed.
So, it is possible that restricting the possibility of new, unexperienced users to create projects could in part relieve this problem.
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Don’t you have to have 50 observations to create a project? Or was that just for places? And yes, in my experience a lot of teachers who use iNaturalist are unaware of captive/cultivated or unsure when to use it, so obviously they don’t teach that to their students. That was the #1 thing I had to explain when we did our BioBlitz at the university. Excluding captive/cultivated from counting for the project (and therefore from receiving credit) seemed a good way to make students take notice and learn about this, but educators have to understand and set that up to make it work.
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Not sure about requirements, but I saw teachers with 200 observations who had no idea how to really use iNat, set up projects correctly, etc., and of course their project was full of garbage shots.
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The 50 verifiable observation requirement before creating a project is still in place. I will post on another thread about off channel resources available to educators to learn about how to use iNaturalist in a pedagogically enriching way.
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If it was for me, at least 50 research grade observations, at least…
This is the requirement to create a place not a project. Now every newbie, in good faith or unscrupulous, can create a project.
Ok, I see where I misread. You need 50 verifiable observations to create a traditional project. Any iNat user can create a collection project.
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I have created this quiz at an interactive quiz platform, so that educators can share it and get answers in real time. You can see it at https://faabul.com/l/iNat-or-iNot
I had to change the photos a bit, but I hope you will like it and it will be useful.