Oh yes - we have been promised ‘better onboarding’
Meanwhile - encouraging new iNatters is why I ID today’s obs. So that new people get some engagement. With kind and helpful copypasta at the ready.
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There’s probably arguments to be made that just because some plants are planted in a garden, that it doesn’t mean they are casual.
For example, I planted some lupines a few years ago, I did not cut the seed pods, and as a result, I have lupine seedlings coming up. Now, the seedlings are still in my garden but they came up entirely on their own volition - but if posted a picture of them on my inat, I would be completely unsurprised if someone marked them casual grade - even though if those same seeds got picked up by a bird and dropped in the field down the road and sprouted there, no one would think twice about it.
Another example is the crazy amount of daffodils you see scattered throughout cuyahoga valley national park in the spring. They’re not native to Ohio in the slightest, and were almost certainly planted at homesteads in the area long before it was ever a park, but over the years they’ve naturalized to the area and spread.
IDK. There’s just so much nuance to the subject
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Technically, the self-seeded offspring of cultivated plants can be considered wild on iNaturalist.
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I know, but I bring them up as an example because unless I posted it and specifically made a note saying ‘this was self seeded’ you wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference if you just came across it.
Any observer would just see a cultivated plant in a flowerbed, the first assumption would be that it was intentionally placed there.
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Of course. If this case, you might have to write a note explaining the situation and vote “wild” under “Is the organism wild” in the Data Quality area.
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And if I were going to post garden plants, I absolutely would do this (I don’t really have much interest in it, but that’s beside the point.)
I think ultimately my point is, I spend a lot of time going through the unknown pile when I’m bored and I’ve never, ever seen a note like that on a plant that obviously had mulch around it, and then I just have to guess at whether or not I think its cultivated or wild.
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@sedgequeen I don’t often find myself at odds with your sentiments, but in this case, I’m afraid I do.
- Market photos typically will have no information about the origin of the plants or animals, except perhaps by country of origin. I would hazard a guess that products in most markets in most areas are sourced from many far-flung locations, and only some small portion are local.
- There should be any number of other sources for your images of unusual tropical plants for use in a lecture. Please don’t encourage iNaturalist to become a source of some market-sourced images.
- Uploading images of market products for the purpose of IDing a product is IMHO an extremely marginal case for placement in iNaturalist. If it is done solely for this purpose, the observation should be subsequently deleted.
- Helping to educate us by including market photos may have some marginal utility, but the images, again, should absolutely be marked “not wild” to ensure they remain “Casual”. “Casual” doesn’t mean defective; it means “unavailable for rigorous natural history research and documentation”.
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The pop-ups are a very interesting idea! As long as there was a way to turn them off once they have served their function. I can imagine “suggestions” similar to the Identification suggestions popping up, such as, “Feel free to add a close-up photo of the leaf and another of the flower, in addition to this photo of the plant from ten meters away.” :-)
Getting more successful identifications and feedback would probably increase the retention of new users significantly.
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And that ambiguity is why I usually ignore observations in & near towns… it becomes very hard to filter all the captive / cultivated plants out, especially if people are trying to push the line towards marking things as wild whenever they can…
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Your lupins are on our Cape Town mountains. Escaped from once was a farm, since they are not commonorgarden here.
Somewhat related to this…
I’ve been really bothered by the default photo for papaya:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/62811-Carica-papaya
It appears to be a market photo. It was taken from Flickr, not iNaturalist, so it has no “grade”, research or otherwise. Last week I changed the default photo for the species to a photo that shows an actual plant with leaves and fruit. But now the default is back to the apparent market photo. Why is this? How can a market photo of fruit be repeatedly chosen as the default photo for a species?
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Agree, the genus photo is much more what one is likely to see: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/62823-Carica
Unless, of course, one is at the market, I suppose…
(Mine I am 99% positive are gifts from the bats.)
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If you are confident you know what type of photo would help people identify a wild papaya, you are welcome to scroll down on the species page you linked above and click on “Curation.” Then select, “Edit Photos” and drag the appropriate research grade photos that are suggested in the box on the left to the one on the right.
Sometimes it’s sufficient to just reorder the photos that already have been selected.
I’ve done this quite often when there’s a species I know well that has some gorgeous but unhelpful photo in the lead position. This situation often arises when new users confuse iNaturalist with a nature or wildlife photography website as opposed to a biogeography GIS, which is what iNat is.
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Based on @erikamitchell’s prior comment… that’s the remedy that was tried, and either another user or perhaps some automated process of which I am unaware reverted the change.
If it was another user, I doubt the reasoning can be guessed without more information. Now I’m a little curious, so I’ll try editing the default taxon photo, too.
(And I agree, BTW, that a picture of fruit at a market is unhelpful for ID. If you’re looking at a pile of fruit, there’s surely either a label or a seller a few feet away that would be your most effective resource.)
We have history now - so I can see how you worked with those taxon pictures. I often remove Flickr / cultivated images from the taxon photos.
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It would be nice if we could add a short justification for our choice. That might help the photo artists understand that our choice has nothing to do with whether they composed a nice image, but rather that the image chosen helps people with some key characteristic for the identification. It would be great if some of these awesome photographers with the wonderful cameras would look at keys and focus on discriminating characters.
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Thank you! Once again a late night forum entry by yours truly. That’s really pretty weak of me :-) And apologies to @erikamitchell for not reading closely.
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Oh, I forgot about the history. I notice there are now two “remove TaxonPhoto 1825158” (which is the pile of fruit in a market) records, but no record of it being added in between.
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