I volunteer weeding the Natural Heritage Trail in the SC Botanical Garden. The trail spans 30-40 acres and is designed to showcase the various ecosystems of SC which means that some areas are mostly wild, while others have been extensively planted with species from the coast (the opposite end of the state). This makes some questions of range and wildness difficult. Especially if something native has historically grown in this area, but I haven’t seen it anywhere nearby.
I’ve just gotten a species list from when the “beds” (most are several acres in size) were planted. There is no Oenothera on the list, and yet I found this little oddity growing at the wild edge of the Piedmont Savanna:
Now I don’t know whether to mark it as “Wild” or “Captive/Cultivated.” I guess I should wait for a positive species-level ID, but then what?
Today I did a search for my SCBG observations marked “Wild” and set some to “Captive/Cultivated” when I knew the exact species and its appearance at the garden seemed highly suspicious, but suspicious and introduced are not the same thing.
Questions:
Should I wait until I have a species-level ID before marking them Captive/Cultivated? I think so, unless it looks planted (you can tell sometimes).
If they don’t appear in the plant-list (which has 200+ species for most beds in the NHT) should I assume they are wild?
If I mark something as Captive/Cultivated, will other people still be prompted to help ID it? I need that help!
Any other suggestions or guiding principles?
Disclaimer: I hold no official position within the garden. My opinions are my own and do not represent the opinion or direction of the garden.
Based on my experience with habitat restoration projects, no, I don’t think this is a safe assumption.
Captive/Cultivated observations are hidden by default on the Identify page, so you’ll benefit from enlisting additional help in alternative ways (such as tagging someone you think might be knowledgeable about the group).
I think if you are reasonably certain that a plant is captive/cultivated, you should mark it as such on upload. If there’s reasonable doubt/you are unsure, but an ID would help, I think it’s reasonable to wait for the ID/feedback to make a decision.
On a broader note, iNat is intentionally focused on wild organisms (not captive/cultivated), so the system is intentionally designed to de-emphasize captive/cultivated observations. They do get fewer people looking at them, but this doesn’t mean that observers should intentionally not mark cultivated plants as such. As noted above, mentioning other IDers can help. You could also make a project for the garden and recruit IDers to the project, etc.
Botanical garden plants do indeed escape and spread! These do indeed fall in a gray area, since these plants are not intentionally planted by humans but are still taken care of by humans. My personal rule is “if it’s not intentionally planted, then it’s wild”, but other people take a different approach. Observer’s intent matters, so if they explicitly state “escaped” or “not planted”, please do not mark as planted unless there is incontrovertible evidence proving otherwise(and explain why).
In my opinion that observation cannot be confirmed to be planted, so it should be left wild.
Since there is gardening and groundskeeping, I typically only consider well-known weeds as wild. Only for plants self-escaped from gardens, e.g. to a road curb or jumping to an adjacent lot without gardening the species in question, do I consider it wild. That still leaves a gray zone, for which I provide a best guess.
”garden plant that is reproducing on its own and spreading outside of the intended gardening area.”
Just in the case of the Natural Heritage trail, the “intended gardening area” could be a 4-acre plot!
The rules end with “use your best judgement”, which is actually helpful.
There is no way to know if some older/colonial organisms were planted/moved by indigenous North Americans thousands of years ago, so there’s almost always gray area.
A guiding principle that’s emerging from this is: “Don’t break the range maps!” Captive/Cultivated labels are assigned automatically within a county when there are at least 10 observations of that species and 80% of them are marked Captive:
I agree! For iNat, Wild is the default setting, which means that functionally anything that we aren’t reasonably sure is Captive/Cultivated is Wild. My favorite example of this is a plant near me that is found on the opposite side of a sidewalk from where it is know to have been planted. It could be the physically same individual that just put roots under the sidewalk and put up new sprouts on the opposite side, and therefore a cultivated individual. It could be the wild offspring of the cultivated individual. It could be that the people who planted it intended it to be on both sides. Because we don’t know, it is Wild.