Reporting wildlife trade on iNaturalist: captive/wild

[yannbigant]

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.

@yannbigant

1. The captive/wild binary: lots of wild animals are held captive (wildlife trade) but they are different from an animals that have been bred in captivity. Captive (non free) individuals can be ‘wild’ or ‘captive bred’, these are the terms that are used in the pet trade for instance. Same way you have captive bred individuals that are roaming free (escapees). Having 2 status to mark instead of just 1, e.g. captive/free and domestic/wild, would allow a finer degree of control and satisfy a wider pool of users, both beginners and researchers, while leading to better data.

2. The identifying process - what this request is about. Captive individuals (a fortiori wild ones) needs to be ID as much as free ranging wild ones, as in this feature request. ‘Needs ID’ sounds like a mark of something in progress, and should remain until the ID is confirmed. It doesn’t make sense to mark these obs automatically Casual.

3. The status of the data. Many observations of captive individuals are useful for research, so there should be a similar ‘Research grade’ status for them that doesn’t imply they are low grade data. ‘Casual’ gives the impression these observations are either unimportant or poorly ID. Back to the wildlife trade, if you observed an Endangered species held captive, you want that ID to reach a research grade status to confirm what you saw (and you want that obs to appear on the radar of the people who are able to ID). It would also help with filtering observations of captive individuals from low-grade ID, high quality ID and the rest.

In fine, I think these 3-4 status would work better if they were not interconnected like they are now.