I didn’t read the whole thread and I apologize ahead of time if anything I say here is redundant. I just want to give my two cents on this fascinating topic because I’ve thought about it a lot (and because I like to read my own comments I guess!).
The main thing I want to say is that the current system is pretty good and I’m not arguing for any radical change. Second, I would say that we should not be dogmatic about how people use iNaturalist–we should be open to different users getting totally different things out of iNaturalist. This is in my mind the great strength of iNaturalist. It’s pluralistic, it’s democratic, and it’s flexible. I look op to a lot of the super users on this thread because you’ve all really been integral to the amazing success that iNaturalist has had.
Finally I’ll just make a gentle pitch for giving cultivated plants a little more respect as objects of interest to naturalists and scientists. I do think the distinction between cultivated and non-cultivated plants is CRITICAL–don’t get me wrong. We need to mark things that are cultivated as cultivated. However, I don’t think we should necessarily view observations of cultivated plants as being of lower value. If we can come up with a way to include cultivated plants within the umbrella of “research grade” and still maintain the cultivated/non-cultivated distinction that would be ideal from my perspective.
Here in Los Angeles and specifically on the UCLA campus where I work, new users have flooded my UCLA biodiversity project with hundreds of photos of cultivated plants in the past few days as part of the City Nature Challenge. It can be annoying to sort through a bunch of photos of the exact same Indian Hawthorne bush–but I still think these observations have value. I’ve been furiously going through the observations and marking them as cultivated. Which I agree 100% is the right thing to do. But it is a bit of a bummer to know that once I do, it sends a discouraging signal to the new user who uploaded the observations–demotes them to “casual” and it also means that the observations will likely languish without further identifications from super identifiers.
Why are these observations useful? First there is documentary value in knowing what kinds of plants we plant outdoors. Cultivated plants provide habitat for lots of birds and insects and are hosts for wild plant diseases. If you want to study insect distributions in urban areas or habitat for urban birds, knowing what cultivated plants are around is valuable.
Moreover, knowing that cultivated plants can survive outdoors is useful data to scientists studying plant ecophysiology and climate change. Where a cultivated plant can survive tells one something about its fundamental niche see:
Sax, D. F., R. Early, and J. Bellemare. 2013. Niche syndromes, species extinction risks, and management under climate change. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 28:517–523.
Along those line, cultivated plants provide immensely useful information on phenology. For instance some of the best data on plant phenological response to climate change is based on cultivated species. Lilacs in the US for instance or cherries in Japan.
https://www.usanpn.org/nn/lilacs
Also:
Aono, Y., and K. Kazui. 2008. Phenological data series of cherry tree flowering in Kyoto, Japan, and its application to reconstruction of springtime temperatures since the 9th century. International Journal of Climatology 28:905–914.
I hope that super users and professional botanists can also keep in mind that many users – especially new users-- are likely to encounter a lot of cultivated plants where they live. Especially people living in urban areas. A kid growing up in LA, or a millennial living in an apartment who just discovered iNaturalist on the app store, is likely to start interacting with the iNaturalist community by taking photos of local plants in their neighborhood. While you may not be interested in their first dozen observations, those observations–just putting a scientific name to a flower and realizing that there are other people in their community that even know these things–could be a profound and life changing experience for them. Perhaps learning about horticultural plants will spark a lifelong interest in plants and lead them to observing wild plants in the future. My interest with plants began by reading Sunset Garden landscaping books, visiting local nurseries and especially reading books about orchids. While, it’s not your job to encourage any new users to use this site, I personally would love to help nurture their interest in plants and if that means identifying “boring” cultivated plants in their yard or their college campus, I’m open to that.
All that said, I think it’s fair to say that observations of house plants, aquarium fish, pet dogs, pet parrots, pet reptiles and humans have very little research value. And I think it’s fine to discourage those.
Finally I’ll make the rather obvious observation that the timber industry and state and federal government agencies plant literally millions (by some estimates over 1 billion) trees annually. It means that vast areas of land cover (outside of cities) are entirely reliant on so cultivated plants for basic ecosystem services.