Re: Do free range animals like free range cattle and sheep qualify for research grade?
I don’t have a direct answer right now, but Matthew’s question reminded me of a relevant post by Marilynn Miller.
It gets at a deeper “question behind the question” — What is the value of research grade?
There was a short discussion that touches on this in the iNat Webinar from 2024 Aug 29.
@loarie discussing the question ‘Are only “Research Grade” observations valuable for research?’
So right now we have captive cultivated tangled up In research grade. I know a lot of people have concerns about this and there’s a lot of, I’d say especially for places like New Zealand where scientists want to know even what’s in cultivation there because those have the potential in Island places like New Zealand or Hawaii where there’s the the threats from invasives are so big what escapes so there’s actually a ton of science that’s going on in New Zealand based on planted plants and things like that so that’s a good example where research grade doesn’t map to useful for science perfectly.
https://youtu.be/LGgOeRJIYCs?si=r-EXM9zCdqWoygyU&t=2946
AFAIK, for scientists who are familiar with iNat and want to use it for research, and also for experienced identifiers, RG is not a gold standard of anything. They will “clean up” a taxon by going through research grade IDs and correcting them. RG is more like a suggestion.
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