There is a feature request to address this that’s been up since 2019 and has several hundred votes at this point, so I’d recommend voting for it here:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/make-captive-cultivated-not-automatically-no-id-needed/112
Yes, this comes up quite a bit on the forums. A few things to consider as the terms apply to iNat specifically:
-Captive/Wild applies to individual organisms. So how much a habitat has been modified by humans, how well-integrated into the landscape the organisms are, etc., is not what these categories are addressing. They’re simply asking if this organism specifically was deliberately placed there by a person. A 300-year-old tree in a forest could be “Captive” if we know a human deliberately planted it, and a pumpkin growing on the streets of Manhattan could be “Wild” if we know it grew there accidentally from discarded seeds. Whole books are written on what “wild” means in different contexts and through different philosophical lenses, but that’s how the iNat categories are defined.
“Casual” does not mean “defective”. It means they don’t represent wild organisms at a known location and time. This is the case if the date is wrong, the location is wrong, or the organism isn’t wild. Wild organisms interact with cultivated plants all the time, so it’s fine to make Casual observations of cultivated plants to document these interactions. If you want to view/identify captive/cultivated observations, you can click “Captive” in the filters and see them there. They just don’t show up by default on the range maps or Needs ID views.