Questions re: Casual Observations

After reviewing thousands of my archival images and uploading 2,000+ wild (flora, fauna, fungi) observations to my account I am currently turning my focus to my personal property.

In 2015 my re-designed our property - honestly, for privacy. At first we simply relocated a lot of the plants, trees & shrubs. We added a number of non-native species relocated from our parents’ backyards and/or purchased from local nurseries.

In 2016 we completely revised our focus and began purchasing and planting U.S. or PA native species (nursery-propagated by two local land conservancies).

I have documented the improvements to our property and I’m currently adding these Casual observations to my account, but must admit it is not nearly as gratifying as adding wild organisms (due to the lack of ID collaboration/confirmation, the process feels a bit more independent and scrapbook-y).

Many of our purchased and planted flora have self-sowed, spread and naturalized. At what point may I consider these wild? Our swamp roses (for example) have spread extensively through our hedgerow. If I photograph one of the plants that I did not plant is it wild (as I am still responsible for its arrival here)?

Just in case you’re wondering…My purpose in adding these cultivated species to my iNat is personal; I am able to search and filter images to view specific plants, see how they’ve grown/spread/contributed to the property’s wildlife value and relate wild organisms’ presence or absence to the changes we’ve made to the land. (For example…we can clearly see an increase in the wild bird diversity since we re-designed the property).

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I believe the consensus has generally been that the ones you transplanted are cultivated, but their naturalized offspring are wild as long as you didn’t plant those as well.

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See https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/when-is-a-plant-no-longer-considered-cultivated/12194

This is my general thought as well…but since the initial presence of the plant was due to my human-intervention, I wasn’t certain.

Thank you for the link to previous discussions.

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You’re welcome!
This question has been posed many times on both this forum and the previous one (I’m feeling too lazy to link them all) and will doubtless come up again, so it is fine to ask it again.

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I just thought of another question related to this issue…

I’ve noticed the observations I am adding to my account as Casual are automatically being included in a Project.

The Project does not appear to eliminate Casual observations, but I feel awkward being on the Leaderboard by (unintentionally) inundating a project with hundreds of cultivated plants?

Can I assume the Project creator will change the requirements if he does not wish to include cultivated/Casual observations?

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It’s definitely up to the project administrators, but you can send them a private message; it could be a choice to include them, but it could also be that they were unaware that they didn’t set quality grade as one of the project requirements.

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