Super post @andy71, all great points and well said! Thank you for adding your voice to the forum.
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Hi I’m new using the app and this is bugging me a lot, I get that a tomato garden or a corn field or a potted plant which are nurtured is not very interesting scientifically, but a tree planted decades ago that’s sustaining itself without even being watered is another thing altogether. The cultivated category should have more granularity, something like “cultivated - nurtured”, “cultivated - self sustaining” or “introduced” or “naturalized” . I disagree though that they will never reach research grade, because there’s tons of interesting research to be done with those, from correcting climate tolerance or geographical adaptation, to maping species that are endagered in their natural habitat but are being cultivated somewhere else, or how species from colder climates adapt to warmer ones (considering the threat of climate change), how local biota reacts and associate with planted trees or just knowing how many number of a certain species there is.
It’s like trying to describe a rainbow with just black or white.
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RG is just a measured state, it doesn’t stop observations that are not RG from being used for research. All it means is that if it is RG status, then certain criteria have been met. Whether something is cultivated or wild is a DQA assessment, which means that everyone can put their vote, and the majority result decides the RG status. There is a big middle ground grey area, where you can argue all you like but there is no right or wrong answer. Just put your vote, perhaps say why you think it, and let the system handle it from there!
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There has often been calls for “we need more states than just captive/cultivated”. Some even spelling out a long list of categories around 10 long. All it would do is make the application of that DQA too onerous, and therefore rarely used effectively, rendering it useless. At most I think 1 more category, being the “grey area” between the two states we have, would be all that is needed. But then that would still have the same arguments over whether something is black, or white, or in the grey.
I have my own perception of captive/cultivated, and it is siginificantly, but not totally, influenced by the statements by iNat staff in the FAQ section. I think the best thing that can be had from this DQA value is the discussions/dialogue it generates! If I was looking for data for a study of ANY type, I doubt I would consider the RG status at all!
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It doesn’t matter one bit for conservation if it is impossible to map the natural range of a plant on iNaturalist! Conservation agencies should no way uncritically use data from iNat to make conservation management decisions! They can use it as a guide, but not uncritically. You (and others) might want to be able to map natural ranges on iNat, but I don’t think it is possible to do that in a robust way, basically due to the ambiguities alluded to above. You need to carefully distinguish between two things, native range and naturalised range. In NZ, for example, we classify many exotic plants as “casual” in NZ, meaning that they are sometimes present in the wild in NZ, but maybe even only just once, or just over a couple of square metres under one parent cultivated tree. In these cases, NZ is part of the naturalised range (but only just!), but not part of the native range. I’m talking here of where it is actually very clear that they are wild. When you add in the spectrum of unclear cases, the whole thing just becomes way too complex to be able to do anything robust with. I often have difficulty with cases of what is probably contaminants in commercially sold grass seed. These contaminants are planted, but without knowing that they are there!
PS: From an ecological perspective, it doesn’t always matter if a plant is wild or planted. Either way, it is still part of the interacting ecosystem. Any insects or pathogens on planted plants are wild. iNat would be better, I suggest, to focus more on mapping ecosystems as they actually are, rather than just what is wild. That might have to involve less of a focus on whether or not a plant is wild or planted, and more of a focus on what plant it is, where it is growing, and what other species are associated with it (herbivores, pathogens, etc.)
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I’ve been trying to tell deaf ears for a while now that it is completely inappropriate for planted/wild to be considered a data quality issue. It isn’t. I’m told that a common reason stated for this, i.e. GBIF doesn’t want cultivated plant data, is actually quite false, and that they don’t actually care anyway! So why, oh why, are we still stuck with this farce? I’m not saying that there should not be an attempt to tag obs as wild or planted (or unknown), but just that there is no rational reason whatsoever to treat it as a data quality issue. As one of the iNat.nz board told me, it reflects a very narrow concept of what counts as “research”. Ecologists are sometimes very interested in data on cultivated plants for research purposes. It makes no sense to relegate such obs to effectively the same category as hoax obs by kids, etc.!
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Nor should we uncritically use any other sort of data. And we don’t.
And people aren’t ignoring you maliciously they just don’t agree with you. If you can’t accept that without long, rude rants maybe you should just go elsewhere. Again, inat is open source. You could make your own version and add as many houseplants and zoo lions as you want.
Wow, I know some, including me! Here’s two good reasons:
(1) if you aren’t just a botanist, you might be interested in insect-plant associations, for example, so it would be really nice to have a map of a host plant for an insect, to show you where to look for the insect and also to compare distribution of insect with distribution of host. This could be particularly valuable in cases of biosecurity incursions, where you need to quickly determine the spread of an insect incursion where it has a particular host plant; and
(2) if you are just a botanist, you might want to clearly see the distribution of potential parent plants for a species which is starting to naturalise and escape from cultivation. If it is a weed, this can point you to locations where it is likely to become a problem.
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well, in the least they need different map symbology. This has already been discussed in detail though so i’m not going to do so again her. We already all know how you feel about it, and i don’t entirely disagree, but the people using the board don’t have any control over this so if you want to pursue it further your only real option is to email the iNat admins directly.
Yes, and it surely wouldn’t be hard to have different coloured pegs on maps for different things. So you could have one colour for wild, another for planted and a third for unknown. I would also have another coloured peg for “searched for but not found” (linked to observation field: count = 0), so the maps would show where a species is present, where it is absent, and where we don’t yet know.
Actually, “absence” would make an excellent annotation
Perhaps add a request in the feature request forum (if Colin hasn’t already done so!).
Hi Tony,
I posted a feature request to the google group back in December 2017 regarding this.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/inaturalist/IzgEcSvXyuc
From what I can tell, a number of us have made the same basic request: enable some way to show cultivated plants on maps. I think the completely blank maps are misleading when people are using the site to learn about species (or ID species) that may be locally common but that are usually cultivated.
As a specific example, I’m currently trying to make a guide to common plants at UCLA. But the guide maps are blank for many of the most observed species on campus. You can see how this could be confusing especially for new users unfamiliar with the nuances of the cultivated/non-cultivated distinction. I realize this stretches the original intent of iNaturalist but I think this is an opportunity to make it even more useful from both a research and educational perspective.
From the designers’ perspective I totally understand how this could be a challenge to implement–so I understand if it can’t be done. Thanks everyone for the great discussion here!
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for what it’s worth you can generate a map of the planted plants, but you can’t make one of both planted and non planted on the same page within the site… and you can’t do so on the taxon maps, just on the search page, for instance:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?captive=true&place_id=any&taxon_id=47560&verifiable=any
Click ‘filters’ to see the options.
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Thanks Charlie! Is there a way to get that kind of a map into a guide?
If there was that would be helpful at least for my particular guides.
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I have no idea, but i don’t think so. I haven’t used guides in forever. They are kind of depreciated and aren’t being updated, i believe.
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Ok good to know.
It does look like there is a way to import a custom range map into the guide. So that may be a way I can get around this. I’ll see if I have any success.
Have you seen any examples of people building online guides or visual keys from iNaturalist data and photos? I feel like there is a niche out there for something like guides but I understand if iNaturalist developers want to avoid getting overextended.
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When guides first came out I did something like that for Vermont trees.
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