All completely legitimate issues. I think the issue of accurate range maps would actually be improved by not lumping “captive” observations with defective ones.
If an observer knows their “captive” observations are just as likely to be identified as “wild” observations, they will be more willing to mark them as captive.
If they know marking them correctly makes them unlikely to be identified, they might just “accidentally” leave them as “wild” in the hope of getting them ID’d.
In this scenario, range maps would be more accurate, because the captive/wild status of the observations would be more accurate too.
To make a range map, all you’d have to do is filter out the captive obs, and you’re done.
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So glad you agree! We do indeed have to use INat as it is, and what it is is entirely wonderful.
But its administrators have improved it incrementally over time, and (in my view) constructive feedback of the kind you and I are providing is supports the mission of continued improvement.
That’s my hope, anyway.
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It is iNat’s choice to use the word Casual. That is both negative, and meaningless.
Not Wild would say what it means, and mean what it says. I have thumped this drum on this thread for almost 5 years.
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Personally, I would be a lot less likely to identify ‘captive’ observations than ‘wild’ even if they were all in Needs ID, just because local native species are what I know, and my knowledge of garden plants is limited at best. So I’m not sure whether moving such observations would help as much as one might think anyway?
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I’m sure many would agree with you! I’d probably ID anything that says “Needs ID,” mainly because I’m less knowledgeable than you.
I suspect I’m not alone in thinking that way. I’m also sure there are others who are actively interested in captive and cultivated species. That’s why I’d favor moving “captive” observations out of the “casual” bucket and into “Need ID,” while making it easy for identifiers like you to filter them out.
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Yes! The word, “casual,” is negative. What’s worse is that the category lumps genuinely defective observations together with captive/cultivated ones.
Keep thumping!
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I vote yes on this.
Automatically making all “captive” observations "casual” lumps them together with defective observations.
My preference would be to make it possible to mark them as “captive” or “not wild” without that putting them in the casual/defective bucket.
Many observers want those observations ID’d and many IDers are interested in captive organisms.
A further benefit of this change: by not downgrading observations of captive creatures, people will be more likely to label them properly as captive. This will improve range maps by making it easier to filter out captive specimens.
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This from the iNat website,
“Vision: iNaturalist’s vision is a world where everyone can understand and sustain biodiversity through the practice of observing wild organisms and sharing information about them.”
While I can appreciate your interest in captive and cultivated species, that is expressly not iNaturalist’s focus.
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But for city-dwellers Not Wild is where and how they ‘engage with nature’.
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I don’t see why splitting the casual bucket into a data-deficient bucket (that is excluded from Needs ID) and a not-wild bucket (that falls under Needs ID) should somehow harm range maps or other features unrelated to identification. We can just continue to not export not-wild observations to GBIF, continue to only show wild observations in range maps, allow identifiers to opt out of seeing not-wilds instead of opting in (and they can save their search parameters of course), etc. The captive/wild flag would still exist. The idea is just that not-wilds would appear by default in the identification flow, not that they would be treated indistinguishably from wilds in every interface and algorithm of the platform.
I do think there’s definite wilful misuse of the captive/wild flag (both by observers who don’t apply it, and by identifiers who see captive things and don’t flag) specifically because its entanglement with Needs ID means it undermines one of the most common “user stories” of people on the platform, by which I mean a vision users are seeking to realize on the platform - in this case, identifying things. Obviously a platform shouldn’t bow to everything every user wants, but when your attempts to thwart your own users is encouraging them to rule-break in ways that impinge on the outcome you’re aiming for, accommodating those user stories instead of fighting your users seems worthwhile.
Decoupling the captive flag from whether things appear in the identification flow by default could reduce wilful misuse of the flag (improving data quality somewhat) without changing any of the other functions outside of identification. That seems like a net positive. And it could keep them engaged long enough that they start looking for wild organisms to add to their lists too.
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Beautifully explained! YES to all this.
Totally agree! Urban nature is no less important than nature in any other setting.
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I completely agree.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit. I have no issue with city trees, landscaped plants, and annuals which reseed themselves without human help (say in the median or ditch not a garden) being treated as introduced or some better name. If the plant or animal is able to survive the climate and procreate without human help, why shouldn’t it be included?
On the flip side of this thought, container gardens/plants, household plants, domestic pets and animals should remain not wild/casual.
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I made a massive native plant garden over several years a few apartments ago, and the columbine (the red native kind) went from two plants to an entire massive row of plants, all from seeds. Did I shake the plants a bit to get the seeds to spread more? Sure. But some of those plants just happened on their own. And they came back too.
Also, if someone plants a tree on their land, and forty years later, someone photographs it, how is that person to know if that tree is wild or not, per the iNat definition? That has always bothered me.
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You don’t, you can’t, you make a judgement call.
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I don’t think it was originally intended to mean “defective” nor is it entirely technically accurate; that’s not what the word “casual” means and many Casual observations are not “defective”. But still I think anyone accustomed to the ways of iNat will intuitively consider the meaning to have drifted in that direction in the context of the platform. The term “casual” makes sense for observations without media (it takes more effort to obtain media so that’s “less casual”) and maybe for non-wild organisms. Assuming your goal in iNatting is observing wild organisms, observing non-wild ones would be more incidental (but then part of the argument here is whether or not that’s the case). But lumping all DQA/metadata failures into the same category creates the impression that it’s a dumping ground for everything iNat doesn’t really want.
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Exactly! The “Casual” dumping ground includes both captive and defective observations. Nobody is saying INat should get rid of the “captive/cultivated” tag. It is important! The proposal is simply to disentangle the labels of “captive/cultivated” from “casual”/defective.
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Not sure if I was misunderstood. It’s the reseeding of the plants without human help is what was meant. Your starting the garden and then it goes on it’s own would be included in my explanation.
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Yes, yes! Well put.
On iNaturalist, “Casual” is in fact a dumping ground for trash – observations without date or place, sometimes even without a photo. Putting Captive/Cultivated into that trash heap makes it trash, by association if not by intention. Not to mention harder to find. Please, please separate Casual and Captive/Cultivated.
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Agree - More, or less, “Casual” has come to relate as defective dump of postings that don’t meet data requirements. But it’s also grounds for actually useful sightings that still have purpose, still have all data fields filled correctly but are being thrown into the same basket as something with little to no data use. This is where expanding that field, or very least adding “Casual/Lacking data” and “Captive/Data complete but not wild” is important for future of Inat, and better encouragement of the userbase.
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