At this time, marking an observation “not wild” automatically removes it from the “needs ID” queue by making it “casual”. It has been suggested a number of times that those observations could be interesting to researchers, but they are also certainly interesting for the people submitting them. I sug…

Would it be better? [Untitled-2026-03-20-1535] edit: implementing it could be as simple as keeping the ‘Captive/Cultivated’ DQA toggle disabled until there’s a community-supported ID etc.

The flowcharts explain well how things are working now. My question stems from @DianaStuder ‘s comment about how city-dwellers engaging with nature may often be not wild. At what point does something cultivated/captive become wild? And, if it is now wild, should it have its own category or forever …

This flowchart is a slight modification of my earlier proposal (incorporating a rename of RG from this thread ) and is my preferred solution: [image] The division of Casual into Casual/Missing Metadata is extraneous to this feature request. Here’s combining those and doing the Needs ID/RG part a …

[image] upupa-epops: [image] This would address the feature request. I’d modify the first decision to include the other DQA flags (location not correct, single organism, etc.), but otherwise this would do. Provided that then the default settings on the ID modal include the “not wild” branch. …

[image] GeolTel: implementing it could be as simple as keeping the ‘Captive/Cultivated’ DQA toggle disabled until there’s a community-supported ID etc. Except that many people who identify wild plants have a (in my opinion, strange) hatred of cultivated plants and would absolutely stop identi…

Agreed; much as I think the core data problem of the C/C state overwriting the Needs ID state must be addressed, I think it’s important to preserve individual users’ ability to actively configure their filters as desired to obtain the results they want, and conditionally disabling certain data entry…

They can hit “reviewed” and move on – same effect, but with the added benefit that observers who have engaged with nature (the primary audience) would get an answer to their question “what is this plant” sooner than later (or never).

[image] upupa-epops: I think there’s likely some missing context from team in-person conversations after this, as the conversation continues on a tangential subject about RG and Needs ID being mutually exclusive before settling on this trichotomy without any further discussion of why the captive…

Oh wow yeah thanks for pointing that out. Even further down from Kueda: I think some of these decisions make sense when you have tens of thousands of observations and hundreds of users, but less so when you have hundreds of millions of observations and millions of users with different use cases. A…

[image] yongestation: very small marginal use case of people posting captive things for ID and IDers wanting to/being able to ID captive obs [quote is from @loarie in 2015] But all these years and … 300 million obs later, the situation needs re-evaluating. Not Wild obs Need ID. And that data …

Make captive/cultivated not automatically "no ID needed"

Feature Requests

jbecky April 5, 2026, 8:31pm 216

I get good results for cultivated plant ID with Google Lens. I use it when I want to ID a cultivated host plant for insect observations.

Value of cultivated plant observations

Topic		Replies	Views
Disappointing consistent failure: users not marking observations as cultivated General	131	9181	April 23, 2020
What incentive is there for users to mark their observations as captive / cultivated? General question	90	4020	November 17, 2023
Absolutely tired of plants not marked as cultivated - Solutions welcome General	183	13305	November 26, 2021
What makes a sighting casual and other related questions? General	53	8278	July 19, 2019
How often do you mark plants as ‘Not Wild’ when IDing? General	58	1064	December 2, 2024

Make captive/cultivated not automatically "no ID needed"

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