Tony,
I’m not addressing this issue from zero, i.e. the situation is pretty clear, regrettably, I suggest. There is some sort of powerful “political” block in place on iNat which seems to be blocking any progress on this issue, as if the decision has been made and is final. I’m sure that it must be technically no problem at all to implement different coloured pegs on maps, so as to show cultivated plants alongside wild ones. Actually, the code does seem to have been changed recently, but only to further prevent cultivated plants showing on maps with wild ones. I don’t care so much if cultivated plant obs can’t go RG. That is neither here nor there for me. I just want to be able to treat cultivated plants for what they actually are, i.e. just as much of an interacting part of the actual ecosystem as anything else is, with the same herbivores and pathogens, etc. It is made worse by the fact that no robust distinction can be made between wild and planted. What I mean is that although many cases are clear enough, there is no precise way to decide all cases. Plants clearly don’t have “intentions” to be somewhere at a given time, so the iNat definition of ‘wild organism’ is not robust. I’m not sure anyone has offered a view on two hypothetical cases that I thought of? I would like some feedback on these:
(1) You buy a packet of commercial seed and one seed sticks to you, without your knowledge. It falls off at a random location/time and grows into a plant. The plant isn’t there because any human intended it to be present there at that time, so it looks to be “wild” according to the iNat definition, but not really!
(2) A flood washes a planted tree to a new location, where is continues to grow.
In both these cases, you might be able to say that the plants are not wild due to the fact that they are where they are only because of the actions (but not intentions) of a human? But, while that may be clear from a hypothetical example (where that fact is given as part of the example), in practice you just see a plant growing at a place/time. How can you know what human actions may be part of its history? The same actually applies to other things like insects: you can’t really know how they ended up at a given place/time. Insects in particular are being redistributed inadvertently by human activity all the time (or else MPI wouldn’t have much work to do!), yet these insects are wild! OK, so you could try to say that it is only the progeny of such insects which are truly wild, but I think you can see how complicated this issue is getting, and for what gain? Not much, I suggest. Hence it would seem sensible not to try to put too much emphasis on this complex issue. The current situation on iNat is putting too much emphasis on the wild vs. non-wild distinction, in my opinion.
Stephen
Cases like that simply and clearly illustrate that we lack a theoretically robust distinction between wild and non-wild and that, even if there was one, it would be impossible to use in practice except in the clear cases. Those cases are already unproblematic. So, it comes down to a judgement call about the pros and cons of maintaining the current system on iNat, i.e. whether the proportion of clear cases is sufficient to not worry about the unclear cases. Any evaluation of the pros and cons depends on one’s perspective and interests. I’m interested in plant-insect and plant-fungi associations, and the insects or fungi are often found on cultivated plants, so the wild vs. planted distinction doesn’t matter much to me. Since I need to upload a lot of cultivated plant obs, it bothers me to see those obs being devalued and relegated to the same status as obs of pet cats or school kids!
BTW, there is nothing to stop a bird dropping a grass seed into a lawn of sown grass, but very difficult to tell which of the grass plants were sown and which were not!
Including all observations on a species map, with different colored pegs to distinguish between wild and captive/cultivated specimens seems like a great idea. That way, introductions of species to new areas can be documented and, if they then starts showing up in the wild, that can be tracked.
And, while I understand that range maps have value, some definition of time frame needs to be included with that, because who is the arbiter of a what a species’ “native range” is; was that the range 50 years, 500 years ago, 5,000 years ago? Range expansion and contraction is ongoing so what “native” means is somewhat subjective. Some older herbaria specimens may be added as observations, but iNat is really defining the “native” range of organisms now. It’s also possible that current observations may document a broader “native” range for a given species than was previously believed.
in the Americas, 1492 is defined as the cutoff for ‘native’. It’s significantly more complicated in many other parts of the world.
So, is that North, Central, and South?
Yes. And yes we know that various people did go between the Americas and other continents before that time, Vikings, Polynesians, maybe Native Americans going the other way, who knows… but nowhere near the level of the Colombian ‘exchange’. So it’s the best we are going to get.
Cool, thanks, good to know.
for what it’s worth, that cutoff is used a lot more broadly than iNat.
Yes, I saw it referenced on USDA PLANTS, https://plants.usda.gov/faq.html#native. Interesting breakdown of categories, https://plants.usda.gov/native_status_def.html.
Can you point me at some of those discussions? I’d like to read them. You might remember me from a previous thread–I’m very new to iNat and I’m a horticulturist. So far I get the impression that flagging a plant as cultivated is essentially marking the observation as trash, even if it is otherwise quality. Or at least it certainly seems to put cultivated plants in the same category as observations without photos/dates/locations etc, when in fact cultivated plants are used in research all the time. This hang-up over “cultivated” also seems to extremely limit average urban dwelling plant person’s ability to use iNat at all, since nearly all urban plants are either cultivated or widely disdained “weeds.” It’s like telling the birders they may be seeing tons of birds around their house, but they can only log observations on pigeons, sparrows, and house finches.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/make-captive-cultivated-not-automatically-no-id-needed/112/5
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/rename-research-grade-discussion-and-polls/590/4
and more in the old google group as well.
I’m not sure why people consider marking something cultivated makes it trash. They do get less IDs. But it’s not because they are trash. The people who do IDs can choose whether to filter those out, and most do. So the interest just isn’t there for people doing ID help. You could try to recruit more people who care about them, i guess.
for what it’s worth i think they should be able to get ‘research grade’ equivalent as others have said, and i think they do have value when they are plants growing outside and being used by pollinators, potentially seeding into other areas, etc. However i don’t think they should be displayed on the range maps unless with a different symbology.
Thank you for the beautiful statement. You’ve captured a lot of sentiments I have been trying to figure out how to articulate.
92 replies? Holy.
Alright, I’ll share my thoughts. Replying to the examples given in the original post:
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If something is captive, it generally can never be “non-captive”. If a tree is planted, and it outgrows society, it is still planted. A forest can grow naturally around that tree, but the tree is still planted. “Captive” does not exclusively mean “in the care of humans”, but whether it grew under natural, or anthropogenic means. Exceptions if they occur are more likely to apply to birds, insects, mammals which travel and have to re-adapt to their natural surroundings, for instance catching a bird to ring it, and then releasing it.
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If the bulb was intentionally planted, it is “captive”. If the bulb formed from other planted tulips and grew on its own, that is “borderline”.
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A perennial shrub or other plant in suspicious circumstances, with no obvious origin, especially if it isn’t a species that normally occurs in that area, is also “borderline”. If there is evidence it was planted (e.g. someone says it was part of restoration, or it is learned it is a known planting), then it should be marked “captive”.
So in my eyes, all of these cases would generally be marked captive, unless there is good reason to believe it grew on its own. However, no matter the origin, it is probably arguable that any offspring (e.g. a planted tree producing saplings that then grow into their own trees) are “wild”. At the worst, these are “borderline” cases.
Note that “captive” solely refers to the origin of the plant. A plant does not outlive its origin. It does not refer to how the plant “blends in” or “interacts” with native habitats or other environments. It solely refers to whether it grew “naturally” or, if it was encouraged by humans. That is how the iNaturalist rating seems to work, whether we agree with it or not.
A similar rating occurs in birdwatching. A natural vagrant (foreign species accidentally migrating to another country) is safe. But if a non-migratory bird shows up at a port or harbour, it is likely “ship-assisted”. This is considered anthropogenic movement so the bird is not counted as wild or as a genuine arrival. Such birds are not counted on country lists.
As a botanist who uses biological metadata on a daily basis, the distinction between cultivated and wild is hugely important to my work.
Yes there will always be edge cases, and there are always uncertainties (is this oak tree in the middle of a eucalypt forest persisting from an old house-site that has disappeared, i.e cultivated, or is it a natural seedling of such a tree - wild).
Despite those uncertainties, I still need to know for any observations or specimens whether they spontaneously grew in that site with no help (native plants, exotics that are potential weeds), or whether they were put there by someone (one can’t make inferences about weedy potential in this case, for example). The fact that plant germinated and grew without aid is ecologically much more informative than simply the fact that it is there.
It seems to me that much of the discussion here about the merits of what iNat does with observations marked as ‘not wild’ should be moved somewhere else.
There are two separate issues:
- Should we tag planted/captive organisms as such when this information is known?
- How should iNaturalist handle observations tagged as not wild?
As to @mreith’s comment on wilderness:
sounds like a fallacy … should look up the name of that one.
At least here in Australia, it is not uncommon for landscapes that are the result of 40,000–60,000 years of Aboriginal land management to be referred to as ‘wilderness’ as a way to demean Aboriginal people and their contribution.
The two issues aren’t entirely separate, however I would agree with (1), yes we should tag them as planted when that seems clear. My main problem is with (2), whereby currently iNat effectively relegates obs of cultivated plants to the same junk category as hoax observations by kids, etc. There seems to be something “political” behind this? Donald Hobern may not have wanted cultivated plant obs to go to GBIF (@dhobern), but other information received suggests that GBIF doesn’t actually care (and Donald is no longer at the helm of GBIF). Even if we don’t want cultivated plant obs to go ResearchGrade, that doesn’t mean that we have to treat them as worthless! Leaving them off maps is counterproductive, even though we don’t want them showing on the maps as if wild. The fact that there isn’t really a robust distinction between wild and planted anyway just makes it seem even more wrong to treat cultivated plant obs as worthless.
i think the thing that keeps getting missed here is that identifiers can filter for captive/cultivated species to ID. They aren’t in the ‘junk’ category because the admins put them there. If they are in the ‘junk’ category it is because most identifiers don’t have interest in identifying them. I don’t know the answer to that one, maybe recruit more identifiers who want to identify cultivated species? I personally don’t usually do so, unless it’s an observer who i know adds high quality/interesting content, because it also includes things that are truly junk.
photo of a planted landscape perennial covered in bees: very much valuable
Blurry photo of a houseplant: pretty much useless.
Picture of pet dog in someone’s house: cute, but not useful for iNat’s purposes
etc
There are more of the latter than the former, at least in my experience
I admit I haven’t read all of the 92(!) comments (many of which seem to have diverged from the spirit of the OPs original question), but here is my take. In urban landscapes like this one (Philadelphia) there are many instances of once-cultivated plants escaping and naturalizing in an adjacent area, because they are able to adapt, reproduce and form a stable population in the “wild”. In the urban case, that “wild” area might be a vacant lot with compressed heavy-metal contaminated soil, or a crack in a sidewalk or old stone wall, or a 1000-acre semi-managed piece of parkland. These types of observations now clearly count as wild/naturalized according to current iNat definition. Nobody is coming by and watering them; they’re self-sustaining. If the community has a need to know whether the specific tree/perrenial/fish/turtle/etc. in question was ever captive or cultivated in the past, then there should be a third category for that. It might be an interesting category and probably useful for those who study urban ecosystems.
To get more specific with your examples, you seem to be drawing a bright line at the point of seed dissemination. Once a seed from a cultivated plant detaches from its parent plant then it is no longer “captive”. Is that the idea?
This presents a bit of a challenge for a cultivated plant that can “escape” vegetatively – stolons, bulbs, field layering, etc. (really the vegetative modes of escape are numerous).
I’m not disagreeing here with the definition, but I think we might as well get into the weeds (pun intended) and get as precise and technical as we can. If we have difficulties applying a definition in all cases we can explore those “borderline” cases.
Another borderline case would be ornamental annuals. These may be seeded into someones garden one year but then replant themselves. Clearly the gardener intends them to be there but they count as “non-cultivated” because they came from seeds the gardener didn’t plant by hand?
Also birders have stricter rules regarding “countable” species. Not only can the individual bird itself not be one that was transported by humans (as you point out), but actually it must be part of a self sustaining population. Thus the offspring of escapees or released birds do not count either, rather birders wait to designate something as countable until a long-term population has established.
In fact looking at the ABA criteria for establishment of exotics may be useful for this discussion about plants: http://listing.aba.org/criteria-determining-establishment-exotics/
To be clear this does not cover if a sighting is countable, it covers if a species is appropriate to add to a checklist under the category of established. Naturally vagrant birds that are not part of a breeding established population are absolutely countable under ABA rules.
You’ve made the point a few times here that because identifiers don’t ID cultivated observations this is an indication that they are of less interest in general or less valuable.
I take your point (and I think you are probably right). But the counter argument is that a lot of people don’t ID cultivated plants because they want to contribute to “research grade” observations. So identifiers may be responding what iNaturalist implies is valuable rather than making their own value judgement.
To play devils advocate a little more, there are a lot of observations of cultivated plants submitted by new users. That would argue that many users do have an interest in identifying cultivated plants or learning more about them. So the question may not be as simple as what’s most of interest to users, but rather which user’s interests should iNaturalist focus on.