I understand the rationale of the organisers in focusing the City Nature Challenge on wild organisms, however I wanted to highlight some of the values of cultivated plant records.
I’m one of the identifiers who helps identify plants (and mushrooms) when a person or pet has eaten something unknown and it might be toxic (we are a group on Facebook). Ideally, there will be people who are relatively local who are doing the identifications as they will know what is around, but sometimes a local person isn’t available. On occasion, I find myself trying to identify a tree in Honolulu or working out what plants in the Myrtaceae are in southern California, and iNaturalist has helped me to narrow down possibilities. Clearly, whether a plant is cultivated or wild is irrelevant for that purpose. I really just want to know what’s present and ideally whether it’s common or not.
Having cultivated plants on iNaturalist does have value beyond getting people engaged with what they are seeing around them. There are all sorts of reasons we may want to know what cultivated plants are around us. It can also be useful for evaluating how common invasive plants are in cultivation, which can affect management decisions. When a new plant pest arrives in an area and it has a fairly narrow host range, it can be useful to know where host plants are found. Also, anyone making an observation of a pest or pathogen on a plant should consider also making an observation of the plant, because it can be important to know the host plant’s identity (this is something iNaturalist doesn’t do well in terms of linking observations).
I’m sure there are more I haven’t thought of.
It’s obviously important that cultivated plants are labelled as such, and I frequently tick that box when I’m identifying observations which are obviously cultivated. I also ask if it’s less obvious but I suspect a cultivated specimen. If I had more time, I’d do more of this.
In some cases, the only observation(s) of a species is in a botanical garden. These photos can help identifiers (confirm, or rule out, what another observation could be).
My understanding is that cultivated plants do have tremendous value, and are welcome on iNaturalist, as long as they are marked as cultivated.
With regard to the City Nature Challenge, including cultivated plants contributes to identifier burnout, which has been discussed in other threads.
The fact that iNaturalist has decided that cultivated plants should not be a focus of attention is not the same thing as suggesting that records of cultivated plants have no value.
You may wish to add a vote to this feature request:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/make-captive-cultivated-not-automatically-no-id-needed/112/216
This is an argument for recording what the host plant is; it is not necessarily an argument for making observations of cultivated host plants.
Most of the time if I am making an observation of a pest or pathogen or potentially host-specific insect on a cultivated plant, I know what that plant is and can put it in the notes and/or an observation field. I have never yet encountered a situation where I needed to upload a cultivated plant merely to document an organism associated with it. (I have occasionally uploaded observations of cultivated plants for other reasons.)
Not cultivated plants per se. The problem is cultivated plants that are not marked as cultivated. (As well as, in some cases, people making observations just for the sake of making observations during the CNC – e.g., wandering around a tree nursery and photographing the inventory.)
Identifiers need to be able to exclude cultivated plants from their searches if they choose. The resources that I rely on for identifying plants in my region are mostly based on wild plants. They do not contain information about the dozens of cultivars and hybrids and imported species that are frequently sold in garden centers but rarely or never found outside of cultivated contexts. I therefore cannot make meaningful suggestions about such plants. If observations are not marked as cultivated, important contextual context relevant for determining an ID is missing and identifiers cannot choose how to spend their time most effectively.
And my favorite reason to upload cultivated plants is tracking phenology, especially first blooms from year to year in my garden.
Or here’s a case where cultivated observations can help get the plant closer to CV inclusion: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?preferred_place_id=9&taxon_id=489456&verifiable=any
I think the usefulness of cultivated plants for this really depends. In a set location like your garden with established plantings and similar human inputs/interventions from year to year, it probably constitutes meaningful phenology data.
Or I’ve been documenting Aesculus hippocastanum planted along streets and in parks that are stress blooming in late summer as a result of drought and leafminer infestations.
But a lot of the cultivated plants I see where I live (urban area with mostly apartments rather than single-family housing) are in window boxes or on balconies or in narrow strips around the buildings that might be replanted every year or every month with flowers that were grown under fairly artificial conditions before being put in the flower bed. These aren’t going to provide any meaningful phenology data, except perhaps in a sociological sense (i.e., urban residents’ seasonal desire for green and blooming plants to brighten up their outdoor spaces).
Cultivated plant observations are potentially useful for tracking the initial point of invasive plants as well, not just tracking pathogens and pests.
We’re using cultivated observations to link to plant-pollinator interactions. For many taxa, cultivated plants are used heavily, but ‘casual/cultivated’ is not even applied consistently across inaturalist. So we need to download all research-grade and cultivated observations. Wish there was an easier way to large quantities of these observations easily.