Hello, I’m new on the forum so hello everyone :wave: I’m starting a new thread about reporting wildlife trade observations on iNaturalist, following a discussion on whether to mark these as captive or wild. The discussion is here . There has been a few threads talking about reporting wildlife trad…

Thanks, Yann. It seems pretty clear that iNaturalist was probably not set up with documentation of the wildlife trade in the forefront of the creator’s minds. And yet it has the potential to be a powerful resource to people and agencies working in that space. The wild/domestic, free/captive solutio…

Welcome to the forum, I think the post is fine. In the situations offered, though, I think it’s pretty unambiguous, that these organisms are captive by iNat’s definition, as they clearly aren’t in the location where they are observed because they want to be, but because humans are tracking them. I …

[image] ruthapp: And yet it has the potential to be a powerful resource to people and agencies working in that space. iNaturalist was not meant to become the be-all-end-all of biodiversity. Nor was it meant to be redundant with databases on various specific aspects of biodiversity.

Hi, Apologies, I haven’t find time earlier to reply. Thank you for the replies. @ruthapp I definitely agree with you and @cthawley your feedback is very interesting. Indeed I think differentiating specimens seen as completely wild/free roaming (with date/location important for GBIF) from wild spec…

help FAQ > What does captive / cultivated mean? Since this tends to be kind of a gray area, here are some concrete examples: Captive / cultivated (planted) butterfly mounted in a display case and not appropriately marked with date and location of original collection Wild snake that you just …

After doing some reading and to refine my initial post, I think it burns down to several categories/status that are connected and probably shouldn’t. [image] Make captive/cultivated not automatically "no ID needed" The captive/wild binary: lots of wild animals are held captive (wildlife trade)…

There will never be enough annotations or gradations for everybody’s use cases.

I disagree that there should be any sort of official state for captive-bred vs. wild-caught individuals. This is nearly impossible to determine for many/most observations and definitive evidence for this would be nearly impossible to provide in a photo or sound. Captive/wild is already fairly diffic…

Reporting wildlife trade on iNaturalist: captive/wild

General

Topic		Replies	Views
Zoo animals - why are they permitted? General	28	3756	May 15, 2021
Captive, but captured nearby? General	12	2124	February 21, 2020
Survey about criteria for wild/captive observations General survey	45	1862	October 15, 2021
What to do when a user indiscriminately marks every observation of a certain species as captive? General	22	1101	March 14, 2025
Animals in Temporary Captivity General	24	3794	October 15, 2019

Reporting wildlife trade on iNaturalist: captive/wild

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