I wanted to confirm because I am a new user on the platform. I understand a lot of people use this for species ID and things like that for different plants, animals, birds, etc. I understand it can be annoying for cultivated or garden plants but if we genuinely do not know what a flower or such is… …

Hi! Welcome to iNaturalist! I have a lot of cultivated plants from the old owners of my house that have since spread to other parts of the yard, and I have took some pictures of those and put them on iNat. It should be fine for you to do the same, as long as you’re not uploading dozens of these obse…

For identifying things in your garden, Seek might be a better fit for you: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app But for things in your garden that you did not plant, I think those would be fine for iNaturalist, since, well, you didn’t plant them. Also, people post observations of cultivated p…

You could upload pictures to the app, select location, then click “what did you see”. That will let you look through the computer suggestions. Once you’re done, just cancel the observation. Make sure to select a location first, otherwise the computer will give you results from around the world.

Post what you will, really. There’s uncountable quantities of potted plants, plastic plants, blurry splodges on the ground/wall/sky, splodges of green water, decayed tissue paper - Some of those are memes, some of those are genuine confusions, some of those are useful comparison posts for the next …

I think from official iNat guidelines, things like garden plants are definitely allowed. From my understanding, the annoyance of cultivated and garden plants from IDers is that they clog up the lists of observations needing IDs. For me, if it’s a genuine observation with good photos AND NOTES, I gen…

I get twitchy around distribution and seen nearby issues, myself; I have no more issue with the low-quality cultivated photos than with the low-quality wild photos (I try not to be a hypocrite) but I do like to know if the distribution for that garden plant has changed…

Good point. I typically ID in non-recent “Unknown” and “Kingdom only” observations, so I see a lot of sub-optimal photos (when I’m not IDing diatoms, which is a whole different can of worms). Honestly, I think knowing where garden and cultivated plants are doing well is seriously useful information …

There’s definitely not a problem with posting plants that you’re genuinely unsure about the origin of. If it turns out it was planted there, it can always be marked as “cultivated” later. iNat isn’t primarily for cultivated plants, but there’s no harm in posting some occasionally. For example, I’ve …

Here’s my two cents, as an ID’er: Just be transparent. If you’re not sure, say so. Captive Obvs can be helpful in many scenarios. For example, in the world of tarantulas, where I primarily ID, there are many species much more common as pets than seen in the wild. Sometimes those casual obvs can be …

Upload whatever plant interests you. If you know it is planted = Not Wild, then say so. If not sure, wait and see what IDs come in. You can also make a project for your garden (I use a pinned location for my suburb, don’t want my street address on iNat) https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/elephan…

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General

DianaStuder May 16, 2025, 8:02am 17

for those you use Visually Similar, not Seen Nearby (or Checklist)
My exotic and invasive lupin is ‘your Texan bluebonnet’ and it is on iNat.

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Are we allowed to upload native plants and animals to iNaturalist or is that considered junk posting? General question	13	887	April 30, 2021
Disappointing consistent failure: users not marking observations as cultivated General	130	9304	February 23, 2020
PSA - Please mark observations cultivated while ID'ing General	83	2859	May 11, 2025
Are we allowed to post pictures of cultivated plants? General	8	1057	April 26, 2021
Confused and irritated about non-cultivated plants being tagged as cultivated plants General	62	2134	June 25, 2025

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