All of these concepts are interesting and important but they just have no bearing on whether something is “naturalized” which is a scientific concept that predates and spans far beyond inat. If you want to include planted trees you’d have to change all of the text to say something else.
But the whole thing would be solved just by removing the restriction keeping cultivated plants from being research grade.
OK I admit I did not read the entire discussion, but I would have thought “cultivated” refers to a plant that has been genetically selected/altered by humans. That’s what a “cultivar” is, yes? If iNaturalist wants a designation that means planted, why not use “planted”? But more important, behind a designation there needs to be a reason. How are people using iNat data, and how would the definition of “casual” affect this?
I think that’s all covered above in this thread, plus the inat help materials. I agree the wording is confusing especially since it isn’t consistent on the site (other places use “wild”).
If a plant is planted somewhere it tells you that a human wanted it there and tells you a little about the environment (a saguaro can’t survive in Maine etc) but since planted and tended things (or even planted and abandoned ones) can go well beyond where they would on their own… the presence of a planted tree is more a sociology than an ecology question. Which is interesting and important too. But just a different question.
I think there still needs to be some clarification/consideration. A live oak in Charleston, SC may have been planted, but it produces acorns that are viable. If a specimen is encountered, there is really no way to tell which was planted and which grew from an acorn. So, wouldn’t it be best to just consider the encountered specimen “wild/naturalized”?
Again, I think if a plant is able to exist on its own in an environment, without any human assistance, e.g. water, temperature control, pest/disease control and, most importantly, reproduce on its own, it is effectively “wild/naturalized”. Alligatorweed, a species documented initially in South America, is firmly established in North America and widely considered a “naturalized” species. It may not have been intentionally “planted” here, but its occurrence in North America was not a progressional range expansion, but an “introduction”. This is really no different than planting something in a new area and having it begin to reproduce there. If it survives and reproduces, it’s a range expansion. Only plants that will not survive or reproduce on there own in a given location, I think, should be considered “cultivated”. And, I guess, it is probably then incumbent on the identifier to have an understanding of that species as to whether to mark it as “cultivated” or “wild/naturalized”.
Here is an example of a wild introduced plant that was identified and marked captive by a local plant expert. I believe their origin isn’t too far and they are commonly used as ornamental plants, but they are not found growing in wild untouched areas here. The plant is in my parent’s yard, I know it came up on its own. My comment that it was not planted by humans did not change her captive flag. I disagreed with it so the observation still made it to Research Grade.
The tree example is illustrative of the divide that I sense in this discussion. That is that various taxa may warrant different treatment. Very few people seem concerned with listing zoo animals as non-wild, but the debate gets interesting around plants. I have an issue with the tree example that is nicely summed up by Eric:
Some things are reasonably transient or short-lived, but the Dawn Redwood planted in Toronto near my house will outlive me and my kids - unless someone comes along with chainsaw. It is clearly non-native but will be part of the local ecology for decades. But due to iNat’s position, it will never flow to GBIF where it could be found by interested researchers.
A more important example is that the same park has an active restoration program that is 20+ years old now (as an aside, there are regular burns of black oak savanna within the city of Toronto, it’s a cool management program). Many native plants were (and continue to be) planted as part of the restoration program, but their seeds have led to a much wider plant community. It is almost impossible to distinguish what was planted and what isn’t a few years on, so, in this case, the iNat distinction is unhelpful. Looked at in totality, the restoration program is a success. And the plant community is creating habitat for insects/animals/birds that were locally scarce/exptirpated to return. In a situation like this, is it really useful to record some clumps of grass as native and others as ‘cultivated’?
Is there option to create some sort of category for native plants that are returned to an appropriate setting? That way they would be eligible for RG and the increased likelihood of ID confirmation, as well as showing up on range maps and being shared with data partners that use RG observations.
This whole cultivated flag thing started, iirc, because data sharers like GBIF do NOT want data from planted individuals. It isn’t just me. I feel like this is getting repetitive so maybe i should just stop if people aren’t listening but this is an established scientific protocol and if you start mixing in planted trees with the data, most ecologists and botanists WILL stop using it. So i don’t know why anyone would prefer that rather than just changing what the flag does (allowing RG still). It has nothing to do with when other organisms interact with it, it has to do with the location of the plant itself. And, if it’s reproducing, you can just add one of the new seedlings/saplings and that can be counted as wild.
If people aren’t identifying your cultivated observations that itself is telling you very few people are interested in them - it’s very easy to filter for them, ost people just aren’t as interested in that. If you are, why not do some ID help for others who post planted plants?
again, the data partners don’t want them, and people don’t want them on the range maps unless they are denoted differently.
I guess no one is really listening to me though, since they keep making the same comments about things i’ve already addressed, so i should just stop.
Your example is actually an interesting flipside to the scenarios most discussed in this topic. The specimen you observed qualifies as wild in the functional definition used by iNaturalist if it came up spontaneously from a naturally dispersed seed that would have come from ornamental plantings. It’s also a species that’s considered critically endangered “in the wild” in the sense of occurrence in its natural habitats, so observations of it in truly wild occurrences have a lot more potential value for conservation of the species. I’d imagine that there may be many urban “renaturalized” occurrences that a researcher would have to filter out, but the current DQA binary doesn’t really fill that need in this case.
Charlie, sorry that people are not listening, but I think it is good that you are repeating yourself in more detail. A lot of us don’t understand the fine detail of these choices, and the why and wherefore, so it is helpful to explain it, even when you have to do it again and again.
The emphasis of iNaturalist is wild nature. There is no getting away from that.
Also, even in a very built-up city like NYC there are plenty of spontaneous plants, lots of weeds to observe that no-one has planted, so there is no shortage of things to observe.
We just need to make sure to mark all the planted things we observe as “cultivated” aka “not wild”. The fact that those observations will not attain Research Grade is perfectly OK. It is not intended as a value judgement against the plant or against the person who photographed it.
Another example I thought of, my area of eastern NY has very little tuliptree, but there are scattered individuals growing in the area, many of which were certainly planted. One such tree grows along a brook just half a mile from my house, it is growing among sugar maples, hemlocks and red maples so I would assume it to be naturally occurring, but there are several houses near it and it could easily have been planted. Now it is reproducing, so I think that would certainly warrant a research grade observation. The fact that there isn’t a single mature tuliptree growing outside of someone’s lawn for over ten miles (that I know of, but believe me I’ve looked) seems to indicate that it was planted, but it is reproducing and effecting the ecology of the site.
Another example would be plants that spread vegetatively as well as by seed, as often you can’t tell the original plant (or part of the plant) that was planted. Japanese wisteria and English ivy are two species I commonly see that do this, both can act as invasive species, so it seems wrong to call one of these “cultivated” if it isn’t tended or obviously planted. Neither of these species seem to have any significant amount of their seeds dispersed far, though there are plenty, but most occurrences I see of these species have vegetatively spread from planted specimens.
I personally don’t think naturalized populations/untended “wild” individuals that were planted but are now a part of a natural ecosystem and reproducing are as big a threat to data quality as misidentified wild plants, an example is that iNat shows the range of sugar maple as extending all the way to east-central Texas, while it doesn’t grow south of high elevations in Tennessee and northern Georgia, what seems to be happening here is that people are confusing southern sugar maple and chalk maple for it, and worst of all, some of the misidentified observations still get research grade. That is a loss of data.
It’s not the entire issue, but I think at least some of this confusion could be cleared up with just a minor change in verbage. Cultivated implies to me that a human is currently tending the plant. If the category was captive/cultivated/planted by a human" new users who haven’t read this lengthy thread may input their data more accurately.
It concerns me that cultivated obs are removed from the “needs ID” pool. Many observers are leaving their cultivated plants as wild because they want an ID, but by far the majority are doing so because they are unaware of the need to differentiate it. Until it is mentioned to them that it is important, it gets overlooked.
In terms of ecology, birds are a significant distributor of seed for trees, as is wind and waterways. These “vectors” are important in studying the spread and distribution of taxa in an environment. Just as birds are a vector, so too are humans. We carry seed on our shoes, in the same way as deer might carry them in their hooves(?) or squirrels in their fur. Nearly every plant has evolved in a close relationship with some other organism or environmental factor in order to assist it’s distribution.
My impression is that wild/cultivated is really about differentiating where there was human INTENT to dsitribute, or to assist in the distribution of, as opposed to the “accidental distribution” that occurs on our vehicles and as contamination in our crop seed etc.
To me this differentiation is easily a binary one… it’s existance there is/was intended or it is/was not. The problem for me, is where do the successive generations sit within this. In a restoration planting, for instance, it is intended for the plant to establish and spread, so that should surely be cultivated? Perhaps the issue for these is more about whether we intended them to spread for OUR benefit, or for the environment. But again, there are situations where plantings were undertaken with the intent to improve the environment, that then turned out to be very problematic and unwanted.
I’d have to dig deep into my observations, but I did have one particular instance where I marked something as “wild” to restore the observation to the “needs ID” pool. And then the person who initially flagged the observation as “not wild” then recruited people to flag it as well.
It may have been the bison. My argument is that I do not agree that those bison are “captive” bison. They are on a TNC nature preserve. They came from a population of bison considered wild on inat (I looked). TNC manages bison herds on multiple properties they manage, yet bison from THOSE populations do not get marked as captive (I looked).
The fence is there because bison in Indiana are a very muddy topic legally-speaking.
The carnivorous plants are one thing. I don’t disagree with them being marked as cultivated. They obviously are in a bed. What pisses me off about those is the fact that before all of them got ID confirmations, a curator flagged everything as cultivated without supplying IDs. The same guy did this to someone else’s observation in the area, too. I saw it because I follow a couple of “areas” in my feed, and thankfully “casual” observations still appear when I do that.
The thing is, last summer I worked on a property with a LARGE amount of restored natural areas. Meadows, forests, riparian areas, wetlands, etc. By the definitions described here, ALL of that stuff would be considered “casual” observations. Which I also disagree with wholeheartedly. It’s impossible to tell at this point for most plants which individuals were planted, and which ones spontaneously grew in the location.
Certain data partners might not like data from these kinds of sources, but the binary manner that the site handles it does not necessarily make sense ecologically, as others have described. You can restate this as much as you want, and I’m still going to disagree with how inaturalist handles it. And at this point, I’m far more inclined to just stop submitting observations.
I’m not defending the system as perfect I’m just defending people’s choice to mark things not wild when they should be marked as such with the current protocol. Whether they can get research grade is a different topic with a different thread.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/6704852 This one’s your only bison observation. Since an observation with three IDs of an easily IDable large mammal doesn’t really benefit from being put back into the Needs ID pool, I think you must be remembering a different observation. But, animals are tangential to this conversation anyway.
I don’t think you should be upset with people marking observations as not wild without adding an ID. I can easily tell in most cases when something was planted, but I may not be able to identify it to species myself. Those who want to ID cultivated plants can do so by adjusting their filters on Identify (please message me if you need help figuring this out!).
I think this thread has three underlying issues being discussed all intermixed. The original core issue is one of edge cases in urban environments, cases in which whether the plant was planted are in doubt.
That is,
In edge cases this is clearly a judgement call based on the question “Was this planted by a person?” Age of the plant and whether the plant is “interesting” are not being weighed in this judgement. And, as with any judgement call, others may reach a different conclusion. That said, the only question being judged is, “Did someone plant this?” More nuanced categories might provide other information, but the core question is ultimately binary.
The second topic centers on the premium status in iNaturalist that being eligible for research grade brings. That status is reserved to wild organisms and that was the founding design intent of the application. The About blurb “iNaturalist helps you identify the plants and animals around you” should perhaps say “iNaturalist helps you identify the wild plants and animals around you.” so as not to mislead users into thinking they can identify their garden flowers with the site. iNaturalist was founded to connect people to wild nature, not planted plants. That is a mission level matter for the organization.
The third topic is the matter of having observations identified including casual observations. Underneath this is whether those who engage in identification can keep up with observations.
The discussion You know you’re seriously into iNat when… has 90 posts all of which are about observing and none are about identifying. There are no posts, at least not yet, that say “when you start identifying after breakfast in the morning and when you next look up from your computer the sun is setting and you missed two meals.”
A colleague of mine spends at most a month collecting specimens and then the other eleven months identifying and working on publishing results before returning to the field. I know I spend far more time trying to sort out a single identification than I spend taking images, even if perhaps not always an eleven to one ratio!
Identifying is usually more time consuming than taking a photo. I have no actual idea of what portion of observations are getting identified, but my own poking around regularly turns up organisms unidentified back as far as 2011. In my mind the problem is not the cultivated/captive versus research grade status so much as it is observations overwhelming identifiers. If there were more identifiers then perhaps the captive/cultivated, the planted plants, would also eventually get identified. I wonder how more observers might be encouraged to become identifiers, starting with their own plants. But that discussion is off-topic here.
Reading other’s replies got me to thinking about a specific species at a specific site. The Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park in Vermont has 83 observations of eastern white pine, all are “wild” and none are “casual”, but what is interesting is that the majority of the white pine was planted. I can’t say I agree with them all being listed as “wild” or all as “casual”. For some specimens, it certainly seems like they should be “casual”, whereas others seem important to have for the obvious ecological significance of a large stand of mature white pine. Supposedly, sugar maple was one of a number of other species planted and later managed, of course the planted trees are growing amongst same-aged naturally seeded trees and it is impossible to tell the difference.
In the case of ecological restoration, I think that if a planted species is native and naturally occurring at or nearby a site, and is able to sustain itself and reproduce, it shouldn’t be marked as “cultivated”.
I agree that a more detailed search filter / DQA option maybe “captive/cultivated/planted”?) would be helpful and be more obvious to new users. When I first joined iNat, I didn’t mark any observations as “captive/cultivated”, though I had few that qualified) because the observed specimen was neither captive nor cultivated. I think more clarity about this would certainly help new users.
There are other factors involved here. If you clear a site, and then reintroduce the trees back many decades later, the likelihood is that the micro fauna that co-exists with that species is not completely present. You are re-introducing selected species, so the restoration is incomplete.
I wonder if we can look at this from a different angle. Instead of marking observations as wild or cultivated, perhaps we should be looking at PLACES being modified or pristine. (just thinking outside the box…)
Wasn’t the original point of having the “casual” category to keep the “Needs ID” category from being swamped with garden/arboretum/museum plants, house plants, pets, domesticated animals, feral cats, humans, and inanimate objects? If so, why not just use those terms on the Upload and Data Quality Assessment pages, and leave everything else in the Needs ID stream? I don’t mind looking at trees that are possibly naturalizing in the “Needs ID” feed.