“Because they can get their own data elsewhere, independent of INat, as to what constitutes an early invasion.”
Where on Earth would that be? There’s nothing else like iNat that would allow for these detections.
““Intent” should probebly be thrown out altogether and just look at where that population is existing as a whole.”
Now you are just admitting that you are not following the official iNat definitions. For the sake of data consistency, do not go rouge and just ignore official iNat policy.
By this definition no obligate parasite of humans could ever be wild. But clearly, say, Bed Bugs are a very different category from pets, and to the extent tracking them on inat is useful they should practically always be marked wild (hopefully no one here has a bed bug farm, unless its in a research lab I suppose).
Some people keep bed bugs as pets. You have to feed them using your own blood, but apparently some people like that.
That is simply not true. State agencies, other nonprofits, and many other places. INat is, in all reality, all but only one tool we can use. In my line of work through herpetological organizations, for example, I don’t even need to use INat to know about invader species like A. sagrei, as I am already aware of them.
There has been no consensus as of yet that I can so it really comes down to what one’s personal views are on the matter. Mine are that INat probably should be extremely careful as to how it quantifies, identifies, and accumulates, as well as differentiates this type of data as not to unduly misrepresent valid captive research, husbandry, and outreach taking place, at least when it comes to invasive species biology rather than human parasites, etc.
“There has been no consensus as of yet that I can so it really comes down to what one’s personal views are on the matter.”
That is completely untrue. We just established that you are going against iNat’s rules on what is wild when you vote hitchhiker anoles or greenhouse weeds captive. Whether you like them or not, those are the rules that all users should be following.
Agreed. I think throughout this thread there’s a tendency to conflate wild status (and “Research Grade”) with judgments about whether or not observations are “important” or “waste”. From my point of view, accurately marking wild vs. cultivated status allows us to find the observations that are important to us. For some people and for some uses, cultivated observations are important, for others not. There is no universal judgment we can make that some set of observations should be marked wild because they’re “important”. “Wild” doesn’t mean “important” nor the opposite.
That isn’t the subject of this thread, though. The question, at hand, and one which remains unresolved is what the “wild-yes/no” tag truly should mean? When we look at the possible outcomes, they are: a). They will simply die by some means, b). They will need to be kept or rehomed in captivity and might as well be “pets” at that point for all intents and purposes, or c). Potentially become an established population at some point in the future, in at least some cases.
Perhaps option c). isn’t for the INat community to determine. This should be settled by @loarie or other admin.
By that definition, cockroaches are “captive” in most states. Without heated buildings, they would die out in winter.
I can see that to an extent. But then again there are many species of tropical roaches which are commonly kept as pets and/or as feeders, that do not cause infestations. I just think we need to be extremely careful as to how that data could be differentiated, used, and presented, by whom, and for what purposes.
because marking an obs as - Not Wild or Cultivated - is dumped out of Needs ID to Casual. In the bin with all the other garbage! Needs ID and Not Wild need to be running on separate tracks.
It isn’t our job to decide what data is potentially useful to scientists - that’s for the scientists themselves to decide, when looking at iNat data. Any data they do not want they can simply ignore.
And this data would be more useful in many ways than many more typical observations in highly inatted areas. An escaped Madagascar Hissing Cockroach is surely more useful than the 2000th observation of a Rock Pigeon in Central Park.
So then why should it be INat’s job to track or predict potential early invasions for the future? That’s a much more specific objective than simply recording organisms for general obervation.
If we look at the maps for both American cockroaches, and bedbugs, they are relatively sparsely mapped. This is considering those species are probably already WAY more widespread and ubiquitous than what the maps might otherwise indicate. This, to me anyway, suggests that type of data has limited interest or usefulness to begin with.
I just don’t need INat to tell me everything or to see local invasive species trends that I can see happening elsewhere.
It isn’t iNat’s job to specifically track invasions. It’s iNat’s job to be a social media platform where we can share our wildlife observations first and foremost. The fact that these observations can be used in science and imported in GBIF is only a secondary goal for this site.
We follow rules such as the rules surrounding captive/cultivated because they are site policy, nothing more. It is not our place as users to try to expand or change these rules beyond what they are, simply to follow them. Yes, there are gray areas where debate can be sparked, and where this is no clear correct answer, such as escaped pets. In cases such as these, debates about what is truly the correct course of action are fair and justified. But if an observation clearly does not meet the rules of what is captive/cultivated, it should not be marked as such. Greenhouse weeds and hitchhiker anoles clearly do not meet the requirements for being captive/cultivated, so they are wild instead. It is not our place to decide they are not useful and ignore clear site policy.
It is completely true that you and many others may have no need for this data. But you are not everyone, and some people do need this. Many scientists have need for the captive/cultivated observations, as well, so why do we mark these captive? Because it is site policy to do so.
The policy may change some day, I do not know, and perhaps even the site staff do not know. But it is our job to follow whatever the site policy is.
All I know really is that this thread continues to be the thread other site staff have directed me to, so I would assume there has yet to be a consensus or even answers, if they are known.
All “research grade” means here is that they show up as dots on a map, and as others have already mentioned, this tends to highly cloud or obfuscate away from areas where early invasions may be truly occuring. It is my understanding that RG is simply a community consensus on species level identification, and nothing else anyway, which seems to be rarely in question.
In the meantime, why not simply use the “Observation Field: Escapee/Non-Established” if one is interested in seeing or looking for that data, without it needing to be RG?
Because that field is inconsistently used and when it is it is often used for legitimate introduced populations.
“Needs ID” doesn’t mean “important”, though, and neither does “casual” mean “garbage”.
If we’re looking at it in terms of finding the observations we’re interested in, the “wild” and “captive” filters are always right there. I think the main change that might make this easier would be allowing users to set their own default–if you want to see “captive” on the Identify page by default, having to set that filter each time would be annoying and, similarly, if I don’t want to see “captive” on the Identify page, setting that filter each time would be annoying.
@jnstuart makes an excellent point here – the types of data that we are talking about (extralimital observations of reptiles and amphibians) are potentially useful to scientists and are also included in “traditional” natural history collections (NHCs). The idea that scientists don’t include these in NHC data (including those available on GBIF) is incorrect. Let’s take a look at a case study of Osteopilus septentrionalis (the Cuban treefrog) since it was mentioned earlier and I’m familiar with it 
(the subject of some of my MS work).
The CTF is native to Cuba and some other islands in the Caribbean. It is also invasive to FL and other areas. It’s a threat to native treefrogs because it is larger and can easily consume them (I’ve seen it! – very interesting), so there’s a strong interest in the species’ potential distribution with multiple papers modeling this in the past 15 years. Isolated locality records in the US (including likely hitchhikers) have been published in “smaller” scientific journals like Herpetological Review. That alone tells us that some scientists think individual records are worth taking the time to report (both the authors and journal editors, anyways).
I pulled the GBIF dataset for CTFs and split it into iNat records and other records (which are almost all from NHCs). The GBIF data from NHCs (excluding iNat) for Cuban treefrogs contain specimens from 16 states and 1 territory in the US: AL, AR, CA, CO, GA, HI, IL, KS, LA, MS, NY, NC, PA, PR, SC, TX, and VA where they are not native (excluding FL). Some of these were initial records taken from areas where there is invasive potential – in some states, this has been realized (eg, GA), but not all. There’s even a record from Germany! It’s a lot of work to accession a physical specimen and enter the data (much more of an investment in labor than making an iNat observation, for instance). The clear point here is that NHCs value the data associated with these specimens – otherwise they wouldn’t bother to record it, upload, use materials to preserve a specimen, and take up space on the shelf.
When looking at the iNat data by itself we see observations from 21 states and 1 territory in the US: AL, AR, CA, CO, GA, IN, KS, LA, MA, MS, MO, NE, NJ, NY, NC, PA, PR, SC, TN, TX, UT, VA where CTFs aren’t native. Kind of strikingly, this set is very similar to the NHC data – iNat has observations from all the same states as the NHCs except for IL and HI. To me, this shows that the distribution of iNat data for these extralimital sightings is quite similar to that found in the NHCs. Anyone using data from GBIF will need to “clean it up” to answer their research question/s (whatever it is) – they’ll likely process these GBIF data in a similar way whether iNat data are included or not. Almost every scientist I know a) expects to clean data before use and b) would much rather have a more complete dataset to work with and filter themselves. Restricted datasets are biased datasets (something most scientists want to avoid). While this is just one species, my personal experience suggests that, for other herps at least, the patterns in the GBIF data are similar.
More broadly, we shouldn’t argue to exclude data based on what we perceive to be useful – why would we assume we know or are able to predict what questions or data will be important to other current or future scientists (or people)? This notion honestly seems a bit hubristic to me. The use of NHC specimens is full of examples of unexpected discoveries that the original collectors/observers never dreamed of: the extraction of genetic materials from specimens of extinct species >100 yrs old (collected before DNA was known to exist!), measurements of stable isotopes in bones and feathers that tell us the diet of organisms in the past, determination of range shifts due to climate change and other causes, including early species range expansions – this could be a whole thread, really.
TLDR: In conclusion, I argue that the export of these types of data (waifs, hitchhikers, individuals organisms that may/may not represent an established population) from iNat to GBIF isn’t a problem and does, in fact, have value. More broadly, as @raymie noted, RG observations are a secondary goal of iNat. Extralimital observations of herps (or any organism) are just as valid for observers to make as any other. We can classify them based on the guidelines that are currently posted, but I think erring on “the side” of observers that their observations are valid and meaningful generally fits iNat’s mission and doesn’t damage the scientific use of iNat data as a whole.
It would need new default settings obviously.
Meanwhile some people deliberately leave their obs as ‘Wild’ until they get an ID. So ‘Wild’ includes some Captive.
I think very few people, if any, think that those are actual translations or worths of those labels, but many people treat those labels as if those are the legitimate meanings of them. More so that casual is seen as “garbage” or “useless” (people use this one a lot), than needs ID being seen as “important” but I think almost everybody blatantly priorities things that are labeled as needs ID. Which is why people some times will mark things inaccurately, because if it was labeled as casual, it would be ignored by most people.
It’s less about the actual wording and more about people’s attitudes towards those labels because there’s a clear difference in how they’re treated, which causes problems.
I think the labels are working as intended if they allow people to find and interact with the observations that they personally consider important. If you consider one set of observations important and spend your time making, identifying, curating, etc., that set of observations, and I consider a different set of observations important and do the same, that isn’t a problem. That’s how the system should work.
In other words, I encourage those who believe captive / cultivated observations are important to treat them as important. :-)