But it’s not my “personal view”. It’s the official stated purpose of iNat. 
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Maybe Pollinators at the garden centre: Like stealing candy from baby fish in a barrel serves as an example of cultivated plants connecting people to nature?
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Maybe Seek needs to be pushed harder as an alternative? It may not always be as accurate as community ID, but for people like you describe it may be enough.
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i often see the other way around. people who are very interested in nature, but not that into technology or apps. They try it a few times, but ultimately decide they don’t want to use the technology for whatever reason and would rather just stick to their notebook or look at things without recording. I used to try to recruit these sorts of people to be more extensive iNaturalist users (back when the site was small) but ended up giving up on it because, if someone doesn’t like using an app or phone or website or what not, there’s no real motivation for them to use iNat consistently.
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I do not mean to polemicize but, if on the one hand that phrase is official, on the other the fact of equating, for example, a handful of observations of rose hybrids in a rose orchard and observing the wild weeds that thrive along a city road in terms of “approach to nature” is rather questionable. As regards, suggesting users to go beyond what is colourful and showy and to direct their attention to something else could be beneficial to those who could develop a certain interest in a world that could be, otherwise, hidden to them. That said, there is of course nothing bad in being interested in double flowered roses, Melaleuca and Bougainvillea (just to cite few that here almost never become wild). But I thought that that subject was called horticulture (which I like too), not natural sciences.
In other words, the phrase “iNat primary purpose is to connect people with nature” can be, of course, subjected to different interpretations.
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So, it’s not plants, but insects, I too photograph them on human-made objects and cultivated plants, but I’m not interested in those the same way.
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I found it. I tried it. Next.
It is only ever going to be a few of us who have found our tribe / village, and stick around.
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Maybe I’m missing the point, but it seems like culivated plants can still connect people to nature, since they’re enjoyable to look at:
- African Milk Weed (Euphorbia trigona)
- Poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima)
- Peruvian Lillies (Alstroemeria)
Or are you referring to cultivated plants that look very different from wild relatives?
- Prickly Lettuce (Lactuca serriola) vs Romaine Lettuce (Lactuca sativa ssp. longifolia)
- Saharan Mustard (Brassica tournefortii) vs Brussels Sprouts (Brassica oleracea var. gemmifera)
There are also native botanical gardens, like this one where it’s hard to argue that any plant is non-captive/cultivated.
For data collection and invasives monitoring, captive/cultivated is very important. For plant appreciation, I’m not sure. If either result in “Ooh, pretty flower!” it’s almost like the difference between hiking locally vs. flying to an exotic place to hike. It’s still plant appreciation, either way.
That happened to me with Cape Gooseberry (Physalis peruviana) when I grew it from seed and saw the first flower, though I’d be just as interested to see a Thickleaf Groundcherry (Physalis crassifolia) in the wild.
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Good point!
One of my relatives (a guy who’s very into tech) has hadan iNat account for a few years. He’s only posted 2 observations.
A few years ago, he had some photos of juvenile herons that he spotted in a tree & said I could post. I declined & said he should post them since he had an account. He said he been turned off by the amount of notifications he’d received on his first observations. I told him he could change the notification settings, and he was tech savvy enough to know that…but he just didn’t like the app enough to want to bother.
This was a few years ago, btw, and he had the iPhone app, not the Android version, so that may have colored his perceptions.
He and his kids do now use Seek, though, so that’s something.
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Pretty much everyone is planting plants, gardens, etc. doesn’t make those people actually interested in nature, if they like their cabbage doesn’t make them less prone to kill snails that eat them. Sense of beauty is not always connected with nature when people feel that. For monitoring of invasives, it’s much more valueable to record actually escaped ones. As most people look at the whole scene, places like planted forests are more of “connect with nature”, but a palm planted near house door isn’t that.
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I think it can be valuable, as long as they’re marked as such to avoid confusion or skewed data.
Cultivated plant species can have an impact on local life. Animals, fungi, even smaller plants can end up thriving (or not) near cultivated species and that’s something that can be useful to learn about.
For example, outside of Australia, a lot of eucalyptus trees are deliberately cultivated. Their impact on local biodiversity, wildfires, etc. is something that gets talked about a lot. Documenting a cultivated eucalyptus might not be very useful in itself, but it can help you pinpoint whether any local species can live near them or whether any non-local species have “hitched a ride” along the way.
When it comes to the cultivated plants themselves, they could provide useful data points in the future. For example, if they become invasive down the line and people want to know whether they were popular garden plants first or whether they arrived through other means.
On iNat, knowing which plants have been imported into your area can help tell them apart from wild ones if it’s not immediately obvious (if they’re in an otherwise weedy patch, for example).
I don’t tend to pay as much attention to cultivated plants, admittedly, but they can be important to document and learn about.
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I am pretty gobsmacked at the level of , for lack of a better word, angst against cultivated plant observations. Why ? Without a doubt none of us would be eating well without “cultivated plants”.
And oh please don’t say farm plants cannot be part of this debate. That is just what is it called splitting yak hairs,
Whether we like it or not cultivated plants are here. They are wonderful and useful, they are messy and horrible (in India Lantana is some of the horrible ones - Lantana brought in, probably, as a cultivated flower).
As some one who introduces people to nature that goes a bit deeper that selfies with roses I encourage them to see everything around. For people who have no idea of wild and exotic / cultivated, it is quite possible that cultivated plants are what they see first and most. To then burden them with no you must only see wild things is plainly not going to work.
I , for one, at this point of time, am afraid of calling anything wild or cultivated. For years, from when I was a small child, the Tamarind tree was and is my most favourite of plants. The old trees are easy to climb - yeah they have ants but so what, the leaves are edible, the flowers are edible, the fruit is edible in all stages. As an adult I appreciated the highways lined with old grand shady trees , and the wood used in artistic crafts. The trees are lovely to look at , the leaves are so beautiful.
Sigh… What a tree this Tamarind is, going by many local names इमली (Imli)/ புளி (puli) Tamarindus indicus.
For years I believed this to be one of “India’s” best trees.
So imagine my shock on seeing the dreaded pink exclamation mark.
To quote wikipedia
``Tamarindus indica is probably indigenous to tropical Africa,[14] but has been cultivated for so long on the Indian subcontinent that it is sometimes reported to be indigenous there.[15]`
So while it came as shock, a rude big shock, it hasn’t changed my love for this tree, and has made me appreciate , even more so, many other cultivated plants that may have been planted yesterday, or some 100’s of year ago.
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are exotic pines here, which support no local biodiversity. (Small exception of the seeds from pine cones for baboons after wildfire - but the baboons eat burnt insects, exposed bulbs - they don’t NEED pine plantations)
Pine plantation - straight rows, all the same species and age - and people call it A Forest.
We do have remnants of natural forest, along streams coming down the mountain, where the trees have avoided fire.
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I don’t post a tenth of what I observe. I find that the Grinnell journal format is more suited to my approach. And there is something satifying, too, about “completing a page,” as I call it – when every species on that page of the field guide has its notation of the first observation.
It was actually your thread that came to mind: Semi-cultivated Plants? Appropriately, the setting was a native garden, where there were cultivated native species alongside other native species that grew on their own and received care. I have a picture of a spectacular buttress root on a breadfruit tree – the root is girdled under another root, but then beyond that, expands again so that it stands as tall as I am. As much as I would like to share that picture with the world – because it shows the wonder of nature – that tree is a planted specimen in an arboretum. Is it therefore irrelevant? Must I find a “wild” breadfruit tree that happens to be doing the exact same thing in order for this phenomenon to mean something?
Conversely, cacao plantations in the Dominican Republic support several overwintering migratory warblers. Those redstarts, black-and-white warblers, and parulas people up in the States enjoy during the summer may have spent the winter on the chocolate farm. The shade trees above the cacao are also mostly planted; in February, you can identify cacao plantations from a long way off by seeing the massed blooms of the flame trees. But I wouldn’t call this agroecosystem irrelevant – especially in an area which, like your Cape region, has, at best, remnants of natural forests along streams.
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