When captive observations are relevant

I’m sorry for logging in just to be part of a complaint department, but I’m having trouble understanding how it is beneficial for captive plants to not be eligible for research grade observation. Almost every street tree in a parkway in Chicago, where I live, is captive. If I am trying to do a search for a native tree in a neighborhood, I find only plants that are in nature preserves or parks (could also be considered captive, but that’s another topic.) If I want to see observations of an often captive tree, such as hawthorn, and it is not eligible for research grade, I have to puzzle for a long time over what sort of hawthorn it might be, whereas for “wild” hawthorns, there are many people eager to try to identify them accurately, and it is up to the caprice of identifiers to mark trees captive or leave them as wild. This distinction between “wild” and “captive” trees is often irrelevant in a big city.

I am frustrated. Thank you for reading this, if you did. I am happy to accept someone’s explanation of why the captive/cultivated search function should be enough for me. I am also curious if anyone has figured out a workaround.

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Can I move your post to this feature request? It seems the most relevant: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/make-captive-cultivated-not-automatically-no-id-needed/112

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please !

A post was merged into an existing topic: Make captive/cultivated not automatically “no ID needed”