Make captive/cultivated not automatically "no ID needed"

[cthawley]

If these weren’t transported intentionally (ie, they were hitchhikers), they would be wild.

These

@broacher

a non-Canadian spider on a site next to research greenhouses, and non-native ‘weeds’ growing along the sidewalk of a closed plant nursery.

would also be wild.

Also, please keep the discussion focused on captive/cultivated. Duplicates/multiple observations are a separate issue.

[jasonhernandez74]

@DianaStuder

Then iNatters will be willing to upload as Not Wild, but I would like to know what it is?

There are periodic complaints and frustration over new users doing exactly this. I can see allowing identifiers to filter out Not Wild as a way of alleviating this to some extent; but since these new users may not quite understand the difference, it may still require someone clicking the “not wild” box for them.

@upupa-epops

I think these grade labels would help:

• “Casual” (observations without media but with metadata)
• “Not Wild” (captive animals, cultivated plants etc.)
• “Missing Metadata” (observations without essential metadata)

Based on discussion above it also seems like it would be helpful to have the “Needs ID” and “Community Consensus/Reviewed/Identified (AKA Research Grade)”* system work more independently from the wild/not wild system.

@DianaStuder

We have the recent DQA for Not a Single Subject = Casual.

We need a DQA for Duplicate (please delete)

And a DQA for Multiple Obs (please combine)

Now it’s starting to seem like the “Let’s talk annotations” thread, where there can be an infinite number of annotations for an infinite number of use cases. I’ll second @cthawley about keeping it focused on wild/not wild.

[upupa-epops]

@kiwifergus

Ironically, iNat used to work that way… ie you had a flag you set called “Needs ID”, regardless of the captive/cultivated status. At some stage they decided to make Needs ID automatic for wild observations, which I totally understand the need for, but their implementation of that has inadvertantly meant we can no longer have Needs ID for cultivated… a frustrating change to the system…

How long ago was it like this? Definitely before I started.

@brnhn

I think the Casual tag should be applied at the same step as the RQ tag, when it has a confirmed ID (or it is marked Cannot Be Improved), before that just list the observations with everything else that needs ID. I know that will mean a lot of zoo animals get listed for ID, but most of those can get two IDs in minutes then go away from the general search.

I guess this is the simple solution to this feature request.

My proposal earlier is overcomplicated for this topic specifically and meant to also address complaints about Casual grade being a catch-all “wastebucket” category, but yes that’s a subject for another thread.

[maxkirsch]

@upupa-epops

How long ago was it like this?

looks like the old manual “ID please” system was superseded by the current largely-automatic “needs ID” around 2015, and fully removed by 2016 or so

[zoology123]

@DianaStuder

9K views. 172 votes. 5 years waiting. Is this Under Consideration at least??

I’ve noticed a few times you’ve asked this months apart. Perhaps it would be a good idea to tag staff when directing a question towards them? I’m not sure if you will get an answer though. @tiwane

As for this issue, i suppose I’ve been a holdout and only now added a vote for it. I think ideally something needs to change as it is just not as good as it can be. This obviously causes problems for many especially the those in the plant community.

[DianaStuder]

@zoology123

I’ve noticed a few times you’ve asked this months apart.

because it is only ‘recently’ that @tiwane added those tags for Declined, Under Consideration - so older Feature Requests are in limbo.

[jokkomarat]

@jasonhernandez74

but since these new users may not quite understand the difference

“wild” should be “cultivated” or “not cultivated”
I have already seen new users which have marked a clearly wild butterfly as not wild, may because they interpret butterflies as calm and not wild animals.
A tiger is wild, or a shark, may a wild wolf but a butterfly is calm, a worm is calm and not wild.
An other question is, if the tiger is cultivated in a zoo or if the worm is free in a forest.

[ursaw]

With due respect, I find this particular proposition kind of absurd. Wildlife is a perfectly reasonable term that has a clear definition, and so does the “wild” adjective when it comes to the natural world.

I’m all for accommodating new users, but if iNaturalist is meant to be an educational platform that helps people learn more about the world around them, the solution to people struggling with IDs and definitions should be to educate them, not simplify everything to the level of the lowest common denominator.

Perhaps I’m being too harsh, but I feel like trying to foolproof the platform for a newbie who interprets butterflies as not wild – does a disservice to everyone involved, including that newbie.

[DianaStuder]

iNat’s jargon is a learning curve - and does not necessarily translate easily (even in / to English as first language). Casual? No need for business formal clothes today - beach / hiking / gardening clothes are good.

[anubian1471]

Absolutely agree and back this. I think having a missing Metadata is excellent idea. But we absolutely do need a Not Wild but still requires ID and after ID remains as Not Wild tag for captive populations that are still important.

[lappelbaum]

IMO we should split what is currently casual grade into two categories: casual and something like “data deficient”.

casual to include DQA downvotes for

• organism is wild
• ID can be improved (for taxon level too high for RG)
• recent evidence of organism

data deficient to include DQA downvotes for

• date specified
• location specified
• has photos or sounds
• date is accurate
• location is accurate
• evidence related to single subject

The second group is for things that can be fixed/corrected by the user

I don’t know what you would do with ones with a downvote for “evidence of organism” since they are for obs that have media but that media is not depicting life and thus can’t be fixed.

[quillipede]

This is what I always end up wanting when I think about this; having data-deficient and non-RG observations with sufficient data lumped together feels weird. Decouple Needs ID from cultivated/wild status, and split data-deficient observations away from other casual observations.

[amatala]

I agree, duplicates need to be flagged easily so that only one observation remains verifiable while all “copies” get casual by flagging them as duplicate. But this should be a separate feature request (if not existing already?).

[raphael1c]

I’m late to this, but it’s relevant to my recent experience. I don’t see why marking something as captive/cultivated triggers any other changes to the observation.

Now that I’ve marked a number of observations as captive, they are also marked “casual” and thus lacking media, location, date, or some other criterion, when they have all of the above. The plants I’ve observed are totally integrated into the urban environment and interact with “wild” species. They are no less a part of the ecosystem, and the observation is no less valuable than any other.

This is related to bigger philosophical questions about what constitutes wildness. Given strong arguments that the Amazon rainforest itself was largely anthropogenic, I lean toward the position that the distinction between wild and captive is porous at best.

But there is a more practical reason not to downgrade observations of clearly captive organisms: users–particularly beginners–won’t mark them as captive if that means they won’t get identified.

At the request of a fellow user, I just batch-edited dozens of observations to mark them as captive. Now that I know those observations have been marked as defective, I can see how a less principled or less experienced user might change them all back to “wild.”

My (inexpert) preference would be to make it possible to mark observations as captive without changing anything else about them.

[paul_dennehy]

@raphael1c

But there is a more practical reason not to downgrade observations of clearly captive organisms: users–particularly beginners–won’t mark them as captive if that means they won’t get identified.

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

@raphael1c

the distinction between wild and captive is porous at best

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.

@raphael1c

those observations have been marked as defective

“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.

[rynxs]

“Casual” is just a catch-all bucket for observations that will not be exported to GBIF. Casual (not exported), Needs ID (exportable, pending verification), and Research Grade (exportable/exported) are all designations relating to GBIF data exports: https://www.gbif.org/dataset/50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425ef4a7

“Captive/cultivated” is a separate designation under the Casual umbrella, and can be filtered independently in the filters. iNaturalist defines “captive/cultivated” as an organism existing at a time and place because a human intended for it to be there, so large-scale ecosystem management is generally considered to not apply; it would be essentially impossible to prove any organism in that mix exists in that time/space because a human specifically placed that organism there.

[jwidness]

(I merged a couple posts above.)

[raphael1c]

The captive/wild distinction INaturalist has adopted seems like a reasonable approach to a complicated problem. So no complaint there.

The designation of an observation as “casual” seems closer to “defective” to me than it may to others, because it groups such observations with those that have clear defects like wrong dates or locations.

My preference would be for captive organisms to appear by default in the “Needs ID” view. If the only remaining issue is the appearance of captive organisms in range maps, it seems to me that moving “captive” organisms out of the “casual” bucket would actually make range maps more accurate, since people would be more willing to mark their observations as captive and thus make them easier to filter out.

I realize these are complicated technical and scientific issues, and are mostly above my pay grade. Please take them as objections of the friendliest kind.

[DianaStuder]

I agree with you. But we have to use iNat as it is. With its own jargon and its own iNat meaning, so Not Wild = Casual (Casual means Not Wild, but can also mean Broken and those 2 need to be split, I wish). We have the same issue around using Cultivated for Not Wild - not ‘cultivated’ as in fed and watered and cared for - only in the sense that someone once planted that.

Identifiers can filter out Not Wild / Broken, but only if someone marks it as ‘Not Wild’. Broken is Broken, no question.

[vladimir_fuka]

They are not marked defective.

Also, the difference between something captive/cultivated and wild is really huge and the impact for, e.g., range maps, information about escaping and invasions, etc. is really huge. It is really important to distinguish whether the species (both plants and animals) are just in someone’s gardens or they are already spreading on their own in the local ecosystems, even if those ecosystems are completely antopogenic like meadows, ponds or, yes, even urban areas, where many foreign species become naturalized.