I am new to iNaturalist and am very excited about the potential for some projects I am working on, one of which is a restoration project.
Has anyone figured out an elegant way to designate that a “cultivated” plant is part of a natural restoration project so that we can include these in our observations in a way that is searchable?
I want to honor the iNaturalist purpose of documenting what is observed in the ‘wild’ but I also want to recognize that they are “native” to the area even though they are planted by humans.
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You could look into using an observation field or a tag.
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/extra_fields_nz
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/annotations
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All you need to do is mark them as “captive/cultivated”, as you would a garden plant. Those are still all searchable on iNat. When searching, you just need to uncheck the “verifiable” option in the filters to find them, since iNat only regards wild observations as verifiable.
Whether they’re native or exotic to an area is captured in the check lists for the places. For example, here’s New Zealand’s checklist, where our curators mark which species are native and which are exotic, which then gets displayed on all NZ observations of those species.
If you’re tracking the same individual plants over time as they grow (for example to monitor the success of a planting), you can add observation fields like Same specimen over time.
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If this is a restoration project that you’re investing a lot of time in, you may also way to set up a Project on iNaturalist to gather together all the wild and planted observations from that site. Quite a few restoration projects have done that.
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