Is there still no news as to a conclusion of the issue?
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Thatâd be great if option was finally released, Iâm tired of having 3 votes up on cats obsrvations so they wonât go to casual, especially now with system voting against it!
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More than half the species? Are there really that many observations of pet releases? I donât believe I have ever come across a pet release as far back as my Grinnell journals go (unless you count domestic ducks and geese, which may or may not be releases), and I often observe in suburban areas where there are more potential pet releasers.
One possible way to resolve this (I didnât see this in the thread, but sorry if I missed it) would be to add âNot establishedâ or something similar in the âOccurrence status levelâ in Place checklists. I think checklists would be a more appropriate place to address this than at the level of individual observations. The existing options are:
- Unknown
- Present
- Common
- Uncommon
- Irregular
- Doubtful
- Absent
Vagrants would be covered by âIrregularâ.
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I would be most in favor of the first option, and simply make ânon-establishedâ a DQA point. Otherwise, we would just end up with a list of non-native, non-established species for any given area that likely would have little to no value or interest to researchers unless there is a way of further including/clarifying what those âresearch projectsâ might be?
I wouldnât even worry about retroactively marking ânon-establishedâ observations as such until new information becomes available in general. I donât see INat as being an end-all-be-all for that type of information, anyway. I can also see fears that a âRGâ status could be misleading and/or lead to misuse of that data in some cases, depending on what public perceptions may be for that organism. Or lead to unnecessary public or local stir.
Having it be a DQA point would be the ideal option for me.
The term âwildâ has several meanings, plus interpretations and inferences, and it is without one concise definition. My own opinion regarding the proper and necessary interpretation of âwildâ with regard to observations of escaped pets and other animals on iNat is that a âwildâ animal is an individual that is a member of a population of that species that is established in the area of the observation. âEstablishedâ means the population exists in nature without purposeful or deliberate anthropogenic support and is a viable, self-sustaining and cohesive group of genetically similar organisms.
It is important to realize that a âwildâ animal is NOT any animal encountered outside of a cage or enclosure. For example, a hamster found wandering on the sidewalk in a residential area in NOT an observation of a wild animal. Neither is a ball python found dead on the road in Minnesota a valid observation of a âwildâ animalâthere is no established population of âwildâ ball pythons that exists anywhere in the USA. All such observations are observations of escaped or released captive animals. The species does not exist in the USA as an established wild population.
To compare, a Burmese python observed in South Florida should be considered a valid observation of a âwildâ snake, as there is an established, reproducing, apparently viable population of Burmese pythons found in South Florida.
In my opinion, it makes no difference that the population of Burmese pythons in South Florida has an anthropogenic originâat this point in time the species is established, viable, and self-sustaining without anthropogenic support and has been for at least 30 years and probably at least 20 generations.
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iNatâs official definition of captive makes no mention of if there is an established population or not.
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It has a clear definition on iNat, other donât matter.
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But thereâs this example of âwildâ that Iâve found:
" * a species that had been introduced to a new region and has established a population outside of human care."
" Likewise, wild / naturalized organisms exist in particular times and places because they intended to do so (or because of intention of another wild organism)."
One could also argue that animals originating from the pet trade, etc. and subsequently released, whether deliberately or accidently, donât âintendâ to be there in the first place.
In any event, there is no way that someoneâs leopard-pastel-spider-enchi-calico-lesser-pinstripe-whatever else genetic morph ball python can be, or should be considered âwildâ simply because it may have happened to have been found in a âwildâ state at the time. That is simply not a naturally occurring animal. There is way more background information behind that than simply looking at its âcurrent stateâ.
Some of us just arenât interested in seeing garden plants and the like. Personally, I would find having to exclude them manually every time very disruptive. I think a global user setting to include or exclude them (with the ability to override this in a particular case as desired) would probably be the most flexible option.
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Iâm not trying to claim planted garden plants are wild. That is clearly against the definition of wild offered on the iNat help page. In fact it is specifically one of the examples of a captive organism.
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In a plant context, the biggest set of gray area observations I run into are plants that were clearly planted at some point in the past, but have persisted long past any kind of active care and may have changed location a little bit. So it would probably be important to have clear guidelines for such cases. The current definitions seem to me clear enough for woody plants, but still leave a gray area for many forbs. If someone planted Jasminum nudiflorum 100 years ago and the only plant present at the site is clearly a very old shrub, thatâs easy. Then you run into plants in someoneâs yard that belong to a commonly cultivated species but werenât planted by the current owner (who may wish to apply a criterion like, âWell, I didnât plant it, so itâs wild.â) and may or may not have wandered a bit from their originally planted location. A very strict application of the current definitions might lead you to consider a rhizomatous species to be âwildâ once there is a single new ramet outside the basal area of the plant when it was put into the ground.
With regard to a possible âestablishedâ category, Iâm not too sure how this would be applied in practice. With plants this seems to require a prediction of the future: do you believe that the plant will be successful in continuing to grow at and/or spread from this site? The use of the word âestablishedâ might also lead to a little confusion with horticultural usage of that word, in which one considers a plant âestablishedâ once it no longer requires special care in the period immediately after planting. Iâm not sure thereâs a pragmatically identifiable âwild but not establishedâ category, although there are occasional situations in which I can imagine plants easily placed in that category. For instance, cotton seedlings along a roadside on the way to cotton fieldsâif the cotton fields have been there a long time and the plants arenât spreading beyond the roadside, you can reasonably infer that they pop up from time to time from seeds that fall off vehicles but have not been able to do more than that. In such a case, though, I think it would be reasonable to just call them ânot wildâ and Iâm not sure âwild but not establishedâ would add anything.
All that said, in terms of my own self-interest the main thing thatâs important to me is that it remain easy (or, even, become easier!) to filter out observations in whichever of the various categories one is not personally interested in.
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Understood. I was responding to the idea of having non-wild observations included by default in places like maps, explore, or identify. I would find that pretty disruptive, though certainly others might prefer it.
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I would tend to agree with this. When we look at herps (amphibians and reptiles) which tend to be frequent stowaways, or vagrants, i.e. Cuban treefrogs (O. septentrionalis), house geckos (Hemidactylius spp.) and brown anoles (Anolis sagrei), etc., having these appear as âresearch gradeâ on Explore or on maps in states and other areas in which we clearly know they are not, and/or cannot become established would seem to be serving little to no identifiable purpose. They are nothing more than individually transported individuals, and not representatives of any established population of those areas.
The only states I see as these making sense as âRGâ would be Florida, Texas, or perhaps some of the other southern states, in which case a state-by-state, or even locale-by-locale approach to considering whether these should be âRGâ or can become established might be best. In most of these cases, these are not really new organisms in trade, and have been spreading around via various trades for many decades without becoming established in many of the places they do end up. So, never really sure why those should be RG at all.
How do you think species like Brown Anoles and house geckos become established in new places in the first place? I know for a fact that new populations of these species which are probably established have been discovered through iNat, if these did not become RG then no one would have found them.
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Using the Mediterranean Gecko (Hemidactyus turcicus) as an example, there are a bunch of new records on iNat from places in my state I was unaware of. The published literature on the expansion of this species does not capture all these new locations where the species is popping up. Some of these records represent waifs and likely wonât be replicated (that is, the species wonât become established at the location since it was a one-time introduction) but we donât know that for sure in most cases. Iâd rather know about these records than not know. If these lizards had been collected as museum specimens instead of just photoâd, they would be included in collection databases such as Arctos or VertNet without necessarily defining whether they represented an established population or not. A researcher using that museum specimen information would have to make that call as to whether to consider a particular location as representing a population or an isolated one-time introduction ⌠or simply ignore it. To me the same data-use principle applies to iNat records.
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Iâd be willing to venture that many more of them are simply waifs that are not becoming established than what might otherwise be assumed. Somehow we need to be able to discern what is and is not likely to become established on a geographic basis. In a more northern state such as Minnesota or Wisconsin, it just seems somewhat premature to have these hanging out there as âRGâ when we cannot yet prove, or have sufficient information, that they are established, or likely to become established there.
This is where state agencies tasked with regulating and preventing invasive species might be best suited for making these determinations, as these agencies already have many of the early detection tools and resources at hand for doing so. This can really only be accomplished through more thorough and comprehensive, state-by-state lit. reviews and such. In Wisconsin, for example, for a species like A. sagrei to become listed by WDNR as âinvasiveâ, it must meet some of these following criteria (from Wisconsin Invasive Species Council Species Assessment Group process and lit review forms):
-Does the species exhibit invasive qualities?
-Is there sufficient evidence that the species is currently or potentially invasive?
-Invasive in similar climate zones?
-Establishment potential and life history traits
I am unaware as to whether A. sagrei (or similar vagrent herp species) have yet been widely assessed for potential, although for a state such as Wisconsin, it would seem unlikely that they would meet this criteria.
Invasives | Wisconsin DNR
Why should a species have to receive a somewhat arbitrary government label to be able to receive RG? To answer your question likelihood, it is true that it is unlikely that Brown Anole will become established in Wisconsin, but you never know. It could happen in the form of an indoor introduction. Or, the species could simply turn out to be much more cold hardy than previously thought (such as what happened with the Asian Clam).
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A population confined strictly to some indoor space should really just be âcaptiveâ as it is not existing on its own in a âwildâ outdoor state and without any sort of human care or facility maintenance. Thus, should not meet this criteria as being âwildâ any more so than dogs or cats reproducing inside of a house:
âa species that had been introduced to a new region and has established a population outside of human care.â
As for cold tolerance, we simply canât know this until future assessments are made. Plus, it doesnât really help that case when the dumped/released animal happens to already be dead, and someone just put it there.