that kind of thing is valuable to do and in fact it’s a lot of what i do for work… but it wouldn’t deal with the main spatial issue of not wanting planted things mapped the same as naturalized ones.
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Had a look at the Red list guidelines for using the IUCN Red list, these are criteria that are used to determine whether or not a species is endangered. A similar discussion can be found there (on page 7 and 8). Interestingly these criteria explicitly state:
“In addition to taxa within their natural range … the criteria should also be applied to self-sustaining translocated or re-introduced subpopulations (within the taxon’s natural range), regardless of the original goal of such translocations or re-introductions. In such cases, the listing should indicate whether all or part of the assessed population has been introduced.”
This means that the question of planted or not is (at least for populations within the natural range) rather meaningless, as planted populations within the natural range have to be evaluated like wild populations (all that is needed is a statement of the origin). This might also mean, that for a IUCN accessment data of planted individuals or populations within their native range are needed.
In addition the criteria say:
In addition to wild subpopulations (see section 2.1.4) inside the natural range of a taxon, the categorization process should also be applied to wild subpopulations resulting from introductions outside the natural range, if all of the following conditions are met:
a) The known or likely intent of the introduction was to reduce the extinction risk of the taxon being introduced. In cases where the intent is unclear, the assessors should weigh the available evidence to determine the most likely intent.
b) The introduced subpopulation is geographically close to the natural range of the taxon. What is considered to be geographically close enough should be determined by the assessor, considering factors such as the area of the natural range, the nature of the landscape separating the natural and the introduced range, and whether the taxon could have dispersed to the introduced range without the effects of human impacts such as habitat loss and fragmentation. For example, an introduced subpopulation in a continent distant from the natural range would not qualify. On the other hand, most introduced subpopulations within the same ecoregion as the natural range would qualify.
c) The introduced subpopulation has produced viable offspring.
d) At least five years have passed since the introduction.
Here the same picture, whether a plant is planted or not, seems not very relevant. If the above criteria are met, even the originally planted plants are considered as wild as the self-established offspring they have produced.
These criteria might mean that planted plants are in fact very important for IUCN accessments, and it means, that we should continue to document self seeding and spontaneous reproduction of plants outside their natural range. As the data seems to be needed GBIF might in fact want data on planted plants, and on spontaneous regeneration? Maybe ask then in more detail to clarify?
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Hmm. Kinda like… a flag?
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Lots of conversation here and @danaleeling summed it up really well I think. Some of my thoughts:
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iNaturalist is primarily for sharing wild observations, and that should be made more clear in our messaging so I can take a look at it. But opening up iNat to be more inclusive of garden plants, pets, etc is probably not going to happen. I personally am really disheartened when I see a bunch of non-wild organisms on the Identify page because it’s not what I come to iNat for. Others may have a different opinion and it’s very easy to filter for captive organisms if you want to look at those.
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Perhaps it was a mistake to use the term “Research Grade” (there’s a whole thread about alternate labels) and to turn it into a nice green badge because that makes it feel like an award or an achievement when it’s really just a label denoting community agreement to species that can be shared with data partners. None of the labels or the Data Quality Assessment are meant to judge anyone or to judge the organism or its importance to its habitat.
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Sort of segueing from that, there is always going to be a balance between making iNat as accessible as possible to amateurs while also making it useful for someone who wants biodiversity/occurrence data. Part of former is that we don’t want to offer users a bunch of options when submitting an observation, so it’s unlikely we’ll add more nuanced settings, eg “naturalized” or “escaped” because, as this discussion shows, our two current terms are already a bit confusing. ;-)
Again, a line has to be drawn somewhere when trying to make a definition, so the offspring of the planted individual should be marked “wild”. The point of all this is that when something is marked “wild” or “captive/cultlivated” on iNaturalist everyone should be able to know what that means. They can then assess it however they want if/when they use the data, but the goal is to have a common understanding.
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I don’t think it’s as clear as it could be what “wild” or “captive/cultivated” means, because different terms are used on different pages for apparently the same thing. If “wild” means “not planted,” and is to be the cut-off for when a plant is included on “Needs ID”, then why not say “planted” on the Upload page (instead of “cultivated”), and “planted” on the Data Quality Assessment (instead of thumbs-down on “wild”)? I like “planted” because it’s unambiguous (although not always easy to know)–but “cultivated” and “wild” seem to mean different things to different people.
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A possible solution to several problems?
The subjective experience of a disadvantage (explicitly the exclusion from standard search) seems to make users unwilling to flag their observations as planted, captive. This unwillingness of users to provide correct data, might reduce the usefulness of the whole iNaturalist database.
This problem might be solved by a small set of modifications.
- first modification might be to implement two “Explore” tabs instead of one. First tab could be called “Explore life” and the second tab “Explore wilderness”. Beginners (as well as agronomists, horticulturists and anthropologists) would probably stick with the first tab, that comes with the whole biodiversity of the human formed landscape, while Wildlife biologists (and some expert users) might prefer the second tab that shows real wilderness only (and probably also excludes observations of Homo sapiens?)
- If the “Explore” tab is dublicated, the grey “casual” flag for captive-cultivated organisms (and Homo sapiens?) can be made invisible on the website (information still in the database, but no grey flag). This solves the problem that users see this flag as something that is reducing the value of their observation. Making this flag invisible might help to regain the cooperation of users to share exact data.
- Captive and cultivated organisms could then even get the “needs ID” tag.
- And Captive and cultivated organisms could even get the famous green “researchgrade” flag … This colorful flag would however not mean, that data is not filtered by iNaturalist, according to the standards of datapartners like GBIF before the transfer.
These 3 optical modifications on captive-cultivated observations are visible in the “Explore life” tab only. This means those users using the “Explore wilderness” tab mainly would not be disturbed by most of the modifications. Beginners, horticulturists, zookeepers, orchid collectors and pet lovers can ID their organisms to subspecies, enjoy a green researchgrade label and get help with ID from their peer group. Conservation biologist could research in the wider database whether or not a species extinct in the wild has surviving captive individuals or populations. While ecologist and outdoor adventurers can study the location (or hike to) the northernmost not planted palm and the southernmost really wild ice bear, if they wish to do so. All using the same database.
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I think the intent is to not encourage cultivated obs. They are “allowed”, but it is not the intent, so the way I read it there wouldn’t be anything done to encourage the cultivated side of things. I for one am grateful that I can do what I do with cultivated plants, and I respect that I need to be careful. But I also massively enjoy the learning and connections I am making through the community. My suggestions will always be “from the perspective of cultivated plants”…
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I’m not sure that that you are correct on this. Please see Donald Hobern’s comment on a thread that you started on google groups:
“From our standpoint, it would probably be good for a larger proportion of iNaturalist records to make it into the GBIF network…It might also include cultivated/domesticated organisms at least where these are active components in the environment and therefore de facto a significant component of biodiversity in a region. This would include crop species, free moving domesticated animals, etc. Zoo animals and pets would be much less useful.”
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I agree with Paloma, saying “planted” instead of “cultivated” makes much more sense to me. “Cultivated” implies garden plants, tended flowers, etc. but street trees, untended garden plants left to the “wild” aren’t exactly cultivated, nor is a restoration plantation of Norway spruce cultivated. Maybe in fact it should say ‘captive/planted’, instead of “captive/cultivated”? Making it more clear about planted plants to new users, and it shouldn’t mean that garden plants begin making it into the database as some users expressed concern over because they were also planted.
I also agree with the idea that some of our “captive/cultivated” “casual” observations do have valuable data that gets wasted. Don’t we want to know if there are feral cats in an area that could be contributing to songbird decline? Don’t we want to know if a farmer poorly tends his livestock and lets them wander freely into nearby natural areas causing a massive degradation to forests? What about trying to map conifer cover in the eastern US following the loss of much of our hemlock? Well planted and managed plantations could suddenly be playing a crucial role that our hemlocks were, they could supply winter deer yards, nesting habitat to the black-throated green warbler they could massively change soil and water acidity perhaps preserving some smaller scale ecological communities that otherwise would have been lost with hemlocks. These are important things to have a record of, I’m not saying they should all be encouraged to get “research grade”, but they shouldn’t be put into the pool of “captive/cultivated” observations where people won’t ID them and their data will be mostly lost.
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well, i think it started with CalFlora? I personally would be sad if GBIF started including planted things on their maps, not that i can do anything about it.
The other thing people are missing is… all the ID people know you can filter for cultiated plants and… they don’t. Doesn’t that itself show that people are not very interested in them? If there was a high interest in them they would get IDed at a similar level to other stuff.
Please don’t call anything ‘wilderness’… bad idea for a lot of reasons.
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That may be because most “ID people” would find it completely unintuitive to consider needing to filter for “cultivated” plants when IDing something in an area that wasn’t urban. I would certainly have never considered needing to include “cultivated” for an area like a national forest or a prairie restoration site, but apparently that is not the case.
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In my experience most ID people are high volume users who know the filters very well. They are the ones marking things cultivated. But, if others have different experiences that is useful information.
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Well biologist and other scientists seem to need the data. As already discussed in more detail above.
Well, if handling the filters is easy for “ID people”, why not show other people unfiltered results as a standard?
sounds like a fallacy … should look up the name of that one.
Maybe it could be an Account Setting for “all” or for just “captive/cultivated” that these biologists and other scientists could select on iNaturalist when they do identifications, so the identification feed would automatically default to that for them?
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huh???
well i am one and have worked with probably hundreds of other ones and can’t think of any time anyone wanted to map planted things on range maps. I’m sure if you look far enough you can find someone who wants to. GBIF said they might want the data but wanted it differentiated, which is what iNat does now. You just don’t like that people can filter them out.
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Fortunately of the 26,790 observations of flowering plants in SC, only about 6% are listed as cultivated. And very few of those are outside of urban areas, so it appears observers, and possibly identifiers, are savvy enough to judge when “planted” plants should be considered wild. Of course, that may change now that this has been brought to light.
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I think that’s a bit too broad about scientists not being interested in the distribution of cultivated plants. Here’s a link to a paper that used cultivated plant distributions to learn about species’ fundamental niche in regard to climate change:
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.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534713001298
One can find other examples. For instance distribution models for crops. Or distribution modeling for a plant disease or pest might need to take into account cultivated and wild hosts–thus the distribution of cultivated plants matters.
I’m not trying to start an argument here, let’s just try and avoid being dogmatic and be open to the potential for researchers finding new and creative ways to use datasets like iNaturalist. It’s hard to predict which data are actually going to be most valuable to researchers in the future.
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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.
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I’ve wondered about re-seeded areas, such as native wildflower lots or reforested areas. They were planted by humans, but for the purpose of re-establishing a wild space.
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@andy71 Thanks for that in depth and thoughtful post. I too think that, generally speaking, a plant is a plant (I do plants, mostly). On the Google group site, I recall a post about a class project on the local honeybee population. Knowing what flowers were around was critical. Bees don’t care who planted the plant :-)
Also, with the current invasive species challenges, it would be useful to know where they first showed up, where they escape from, etc. As others have said, when does something stop being cultivated and start being “appeared in the wild”? Or how do I treat the native plants in my rain garden that self seed most enthusiastically and migrate to the wild strip across the road? It’s quite possible that “naturally” they never occurred there before…
This CNC, one of the parks I went to had a distressing number of invasives - in fact, very few natives. I first looked just for natives, and then thought “No, if we don’t document what is here, even if I don’t like it, how will we know if it changes?”. So I photographed the dandelions, honeysuckle, buckthorn, plantain, etc. But I too have limits. If it’s in a pot indoors then it doesn’t count! Outside of that, all bets are off.
As a side note, when I noted something in the CNC obs that was obviously in a pot/etc., I added a note about ticking “Cultivated” and tried to soften it by saying it was still valuable, but researchers would have a way to know it didn’t get there by itself.
So… I agree that we should make respectful space for non-wild observations, and those who don’t like them don’t have to contribute to them or use them.
Dontcha just love grey areas?
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