The obvious problem there is people might think that that mean "Species introduced OR not established, and start marking House Sparrows as such, though I suppose it could all be fixed with an “and”.
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we’d like to continue keeping it consistent where the default subset of obs has affirmative flags (e.g. thats why its “wild?”=“yes” rather than “captive/cultivated?”=“no”). Instead of wordings akin to “Not-established”=“no” (e.g. “Species introduced/not established” = “no” above) ideally they can be structured so that its akin to “Established”=yes for the default case (ie wild obs, not missing attributes, that aren’t escaped pets etc.)
I thought you might say that. 
I suppose the Introduced tag is not applied consistently enough across taxa to trigger an additional DQA question such as “Species is established at this location” for outlier records.
Added note: “Part of a breeding population” (yes/no) or something similar might be way to capture the idea.
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May I ask why you think these shouldn’t show up by default? If they don’t they kind of end up as “waste” observations that no one can see - which is the biggest issue with these types of records being marked as “not wild” in the first place! I think they should show up by default but with an option in the explore and identify pages to filter out if one so chooses.
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I agree with @raymie here. I’m not opposed to having the option to turn these observations off on viewing, but relegating them to sort of second class observations strikes me as a step back.
Also, I understand the idea behind putting this checkbox in the DQA section, but that “DQA” is really a misnomer in this case I think. Having the checkbox there implies that the observation is “bad data” if it is of a non-established species, but that’s definitely not the case. Those observations are very valuable and there’s nothing inherently wrong with the data! A totally different situation than missing the location or verifiable evidence. I would be concerned that having the checkbox there would send the message that people shouldn’t upload these types of observations.
There’s a clear reason why non-wild (eg escaped pets, potted plants on a porch) observations are less desired and that reason is easy for most people to grasp, even casual users (my undergrads get this within a minute of discussion in class when we start using iNat).
What “established” means and how to determine it (if it’s even possible) is going to be much more difficult for the non-professional user. The term itself has a rather specialized meaning in ecology that most of the public likely isn’t aware of (just based on my experience, no actual data on that). I’m a card-carrying ecologist, and would find it difficult to conclusively determine whether many observations should have that checkbox ticked or not for singular observations.
I think my “ideal” solution to implement would be something like the second option in the original post where there are three options: captive, non-established, and established. I would suggest that both established and non-established would be eligible for RG, but captive would not. I feel like captivity is the easiest to verify from a single observation and that those observations do have decidedly less value.
Having the tag for non-established and defaulting range maps to not show it would solve the range map problem. It would also allow users to set their defaults to see these observations on their maps which would help them determine if a population is established or not and be more accurate in their determinations.
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I favour the ambitious option.
The captive/non-established/established distinction should be an annotation, I think, and the taxon maps and explore page should have filters for all the annotations, not just this one. They’re currently available on the identify page and the taxon photos page, but not the explore observations page or the taxon map.
On observations, items in the DQA section should only be about the Casual/Needs ID/RG status of the observation: missing or inaccurate evidence/date/location, ID is at species or lower, community ID supported by multiple people. Whether an organism is wild or not seems to be unrelated to whether it can be identified or not.
The current situation where wild/captive is in the DQA section, even though it’s primarily about whether the observation should be displayed on the taxon map or not, and is limited to Yes/No even though it’s better represented as a multiple-choice question (possibly multiple multiple-choice questions), has generated more confusion, questions, and debates than any other feature on the interface. Yes, it’s a big job to fix a design issue when a feature is this old and tied into so many other parts of an active system. But if the only change is to add another DQA item (Established? Yes/No) then the fundamental logical inconsistency is still going to continue to cause friction and confusion forever.
The first observation of many new users, especially those living in big cities, is a potted plant. Without shifting the main focus of iNaturalist (wild organisms), we could do better at encouraging these users to go on to observe wild organisms by making those observations Needs ID instead of Casual, while still marking them as non-wild so they don’t mess up the taxon maps. I think there’s room on iNaturalist for a small community of users who specialize in identifying non-wild plants and animals.
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As I said before, I’m currently assisting an author writing a book which is a vascular plant checklist for my county. This is the second edition of the book, so I am hunting for good observations of plants not in the first edition. My work flow for this usually involves looking at “wild” observations in a particular plant family and kicking out things already in the book, or anything which is obviously captive (but the user neglected to mark it as such,) and then composing a spreadsheet of the remaining species. I send this spreadsheet to the author of the book, and he decides whether to add the species to the book. It turns out most of my time is devoted to escapee/waif species, since many of the truly native species are already in the book, and new invasive species are thankfully relatively few. The author is the one who decides if the species looks established (and is worth putting in the book) or not (and will be excluded.) However I am the one hunting down the observations.
Would an “Established?” DQA line help me in this process? No, and here’s why: many people wouldn’t use it properly. To be thorough I would still end up looking through all the “wild” observations and editing the DQAs myself, as I am currently doing for captive plants not marked as such.
That being said, I do favor making casual observations eligible for the research grade label. In my county, a full 20% of plant observations are currently marked captive. I just don’t feel like this “Established?” DQA line proposal is a) at all useful to me or b) able to be reliably understood and used by the average observer.
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It might not be useful to some but the fact that adding this feature is being proposed by staff suggests it would be useful to others (I agree). In the majority of cases the default presumably would be Established or some terminology that indicates such. Users who don’t want to change that or don’t fully understand what it means need do nothing. Reviewers who know the species and its local status could change the setting to indicate the record reflects a non-breeding, non-established occurrence. We might not have perfect knowledge about status in every case but that’s often the case about many things.
If you just label this category “established” there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that more than a tiny fraction of users will understand it. You’ll have to call it “established wild population.”
I personally think that assessing that is too complicated for us to expect most users will be able to do it. But I may be wrong.
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Do the categories “needs ID” and “captive/cultivated/not wild” really have to be mutually exclusive? Can the computers/programmers deal with having an observation be casual and also needs ID?
I think that would deal with my major problem with the categories, and yet it wouldn’t necessitate “not wild” observations becoming research grade.
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Establishment is significantly harder to define in plants than in animals. I would like a “non-established” option for animals but it would be better to keep plants as simply wild vs captive/cultivated.
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I believe it has to do with whether the species is reproducing on its own. Is that true in animals?
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There should be lots of room for the many iNatters who live in cities and will rarely see wild nature.
As it is, people often come to iNat wanting an ID. If they are honest up front and say - it’s not wild … they may never get an ID. Some will deliberately leave their obs as wild, and that skews and confuses the distribution maps.
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but plants are not simply wild or cultivated.
There is a whole other thread. Introduced. Invasive. Re-established.
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Same for animals.
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The thing with plants is that you can have a cultivated individual that freely interacts (breeds, is that the right word?) with a wild population in the area. This basically never happens in animals.
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Hmmm… I frequently see Wild/domestic goose hybrids . Also, wild duck/domestic duck, yes? Also there seem to be reasonable documents for wolf/dog breeds and coyote dogs.
Or, do I misunderstand your point?
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You missed the point here. The point is that a single plants can produce seeds that ravel for miles, and that a cultivated plant can get pollinated with a wild one. This makes establishment of a “wild” population very hard to define. The types of hybrids you mention almost never involve a captive animal, they usually involve a feral individual. There aren’t any feral plants, but a cultivated plants can reproduce, creating wild individuals.
I have heard that term applied to plants, usually when a plant was clearly domesticated (such as crop plants bred for specific traits) and then after it escaped it reverted to more of a wild morph. Locally we have a problem with artichokes as a weed, for example, and they’re very spiny, unlike the food kind, even though the species is the same and their origin was crop plants.
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This happens with plants like asparagus and corn in my area - but we just call them wild plants. I have really only ever heard wild vs domestic plants, I’ve never heard anyone talk about anything inbetween. Just plants that were purposely planted by people and the ones that weren’t.