This observation was posted today, and it irked me that it was marked as a native species. Yes, orangespotted sunfish are native to parts of Minnesota, but they are not native here.
Would it be worthwhile to create watershed places for the purpose of properly marking species as native or introduced? While looking into making one it seems like creating places is discouraged.
I edited its status at the county level which is convenient in this case, but there are other examples within Minnesota where this cannot be done. Ex smallmouth bass… St. Louis, Cook, and Lake Counties all cover the Rainy River headwaters where they have been introduced and Lake Superior where they are native.
I see that after the statement saying the species is introduced, it clarifies that by introduced iNat means “arrived in the region via anthropogenic means”. I think the key word in the definition is “region”. If a species is considered introduced/native based on whether it arrived in the “region” on its own or not, then how large or small you define “region” will determine how an observation is identified. If it’s “native” to the country, “native” to the state, and “introduced” in the county, then I could see referring to the same individual fish as either “native” or not, depending on context, and neither would be wrong.
For comparison, lots of people plant and propagate “native” plants. If they successfully establish a wild self-sustaining population of a native plant in a park, but that particular park didn’t previously contain that plant, then one could argue that the plant is “introduced” in that specific park. But defining the species as such on iNat would mean that in the popup saying “arrived in the region via anthropogenic means”, “region” refers to one park. I don’t think that’s a good way to define “region”. The plant got to the “region” on its own. Humans just helped it expand a few miles by moving some seeds.
So I guess I would argue that splitting the map up into ever-increasing levels of granularity to define individual species’ statuses over smaller distances is a never-ending rabbit hole that I would not want to go down. Doing it for a few cases here and there isn’t going to hurt anything, but if all the species got a bunch of “places” added across their ranges to define their statuses, the system couldn’t handle it. (Think of the thousands of invertebrate species in those streams that may or may not have gotten into any given stream without human assistance.) I’m fine with a species that was introduced in a specific place still saying “native to the region”. So IMHO, I’d say not “worthwhile”. But also not going to hurt anything.