Should I tag city trees as captive?

General
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My instinct is that if it’s native but on a public lot, I will not, but if someone has a gingko on their lawn, I might be more inclined to tag as captive/planted.

What is the official way to deal with urban trees?

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3 posts were merged into an existing topic: The category of “cultivated” is problematic for plants in urban landscapes

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My instinct is that if it’s native but on a public lot, I will not, but if someone has a gingko on their lawn, I might be more inclined to tag as captive/planted.

What is the official way to deal with urban trees?

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If the tree was planted (by a human) then you should mark it captive/cultivated. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Usually it isn’t. Doesn’t really matter whether the species happens to be native to the region.

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Thanks for the answer. So if I know that the buildings were recently developped, and the tree looks much older (and is native), even if kept on a private lot, I can assume it was not human-planted, correct?

And then after that, anything that grows from fallen fruit from even a planted tree is also not considered cultivated?

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Well, um, depends. IMO, If there was an older developed site, perhaps a homestead or neighborhood, I would be hesitant to to mark such a tree wild. But, yes, spontaneous offspring of the tree, I would not mark captive unless they could not survive without irrigation and other human care.

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my understanding is that if the tree was planted by a human, even if it was 100 years ago and the area has mostly gone back to a wild ecosystem, it should be marked as captive. The purpose of that binary toggle in plants is to be able to differentiate native populations and spreading invasives from things that were planted and potentially cared for by humans. If a ginkgo keeps growing there, but never spreads, that is very different than 1000 seedlings of a buckthorn next to a planted bush. Of course if you see ginkgo seedlings that came up on their own they would be marked as wild. And, yes, there are a LOT of grey areas. When you are in the grey area, probably not worth stressing too much either way.

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