I’m running a class project modified from the Backyard Beetles and Pollinators project described in Stack Whitney et al., Bull Ecol Soc Am, 2022 and this is the first semester I’m attempting to integrate iNaturalist. Students are observing quadrats that include at least one blooming flower, and recording pollinator morphospecies that visit flowers within a 10-minute period at three sites across an urbanization gradient. The project focuses on functional floral traits, rather than species ID, but every semester my students are really interested in whether the plants are native vs. introduced, so I decided to incorporate that this semester using iNaturalist.
My plan was to have them upload photos of each plant in their quadrats to a traditional project I created, and capitalize on iNaturalist’s automatic flagging of introduced species. But I’ve already hit a snag - one of our sites is our campus, where most plants are cultivated but the species themselves are a mix of natives and ornamentals. I told students to use the captive/cultivated tag appropriately…but now I’ve realized that means the introduced flag doesn’t kick in! Is there a way around this? There’s already a ton going on in the project so I am hoping to avoid having students manually determine if species are native or introduced. Not sure if anyone else has encountered this problem or if there’s something obvious I’m not seeing.
maybe what you’re seeing is simply that a particular organism has not been defined as native or introduced. for example, this plant is introduced in my area, but it doesn’t have an indicator because no one has ever gone in and defined it in the system as such:
Oh wow…I feel so dumb. I’m realizing that this is mainly an issue of my students not getting to species-level IDs on these plants, so the flag isn’t kicking in. Thank you for responding and clarifying that for me!
No worries, the introduced/native labels on iNat and how to use them (how comprehensive they are/aren’t) aren’t as obvious as some other site features. And you get kudos for teaching your students to use captive/cultivated appropriately! hope the project goes well.
Don’t feel dumb! iNat is feature-rich, which is a nice way of saying complicated. I’ve been using it regularly for years and still sometimes think there is a bug when actually it is a feature I’ve never noticed before.
