I went back to check the help page and the wording has changed from what I remember seeing before - it does say it was updated 5/31/2020 , but I don’t know if it was this point or something else that was changed.
It now seems to fit what @susanhewitt explained (straight up “planted”) with far less ambiguity than I remember it having before.
The problem with using the word “planted”, is that it seems to imply digging a hole and putting the plant into the ground. Some people may think this word does not apply to the deliberate scattering of seeds, or cases where seed balls were thrown randomly into an area, as was the case in one “wildflower garden” that I visit.
There are a lot of people out there who would not consider seeds that were simply (but deliberately) scattered by a human over an area to be “sown”, which seems to suggest a more careful process.
Also I think the iNat staff prefers to use one word, not two words with a slash between them.
And if you feel you have come up with some good alternatives, please suggest them to the iNat staff, not to me.
I don’t know, in Russian there wouldn’t be difference in careful or random process of putting seeds, and just thinking about how cereals were sown I wouldn’t call it the most carefull process so it’s something about those people more than the word itself. In the end when you choose if something is a cultivated there should be a clickable link (like a question mark sign or the phrase itself) that would lead to a post that’d have all those moments clarified.
I believe you, but the problem is many people (like me) are not botanists or horticulturists, and in plain English “cultivate” can mean to tend to or develop, which would apply to a plant that was wild but is now being cared for by humans. While you could argue that iNat obviously has its own jargon, the previous examples on the help page didn’t do enough for me to distinguish the iNat meaning of “cultivated” from the common one.
This is why I appreciate the new examples that are now provided on the help page. Whether any of us fundamentally agree on what is cultivated or not, we now have clearer guidelines of how the term is meant to be used on the iNat platform.
I really have a bone to pick with those that are marking any kind of garden plant escape that they can’t fathom as anything other than cultivated as casual. It’s their bias and maybe lack of observation or reading descriptions. In the past 24 hours I’ve had to ping two curators about marking observations as casual when they don’t meet the agreed upon idea of casual. I would think fellow botany enthusiasts would appreciate knowing about the next potential invasive species.
that’s what I had really wanted to hammer home. Pause, open an observation and read what the observer says, look at the map and don’t jump to conclusions or make universal assumptions. And 100%, a head’s up on invasives, to your other point.
I visited a native plant restoration Area at Mount Umunhum (Calif. Bay Area). My understanding is the restoration area plan was careful to start with native species for that area. Looking at things now, a few years later, I can see that some shrubs appear to have been planted and others look minimally maintained in that someone put little rock berms around them. Some appear to have spread naturally by reseeding. I see no irrigation apparatus anywhere.
I tagged the plant observations in that area as cultivated., But after reading this topic, it seems like the apparently self-propagated specimenS should be tagged wild?
Most of my observations are from an area in Powassan that is known as The Pines. Most of the habitat is a feral red pine plantation that has not been managed in decades. Most of the red pines are undoubtedly survivors of the original planting but they have not been “cultivated” in a very long time, indeed for most of their lives. They are native to the area. A diverse community has grown up around them and I have made it a project to document as much of it as I can in an effort to get the place a bit of respect from people who tend to see it as merely an abandoned tree farm.
I haven’t recorded a single red pine in my observations to date in The Pines, in spite of the fact that they tower over me as I walk in the place, because I have been unsure how to record them. I’ve been meaning to find out and now that I know (thank you for that) I don’t like it much. I will record one for the sake of completeness and I will mark it cultivated because that’s the rule but it’s a designation that really doesn’t communicate anything useful about the place of the species in the local ecosystem. There is subtlety in nature and not everything is easily forced into binary categories, however much they may appeal to designers of algorithms. A wild/feral/captive (wild/feral/cultivated) system would be more informative.
Red pine seedlings do poorly in shade or on organic soils so young ones don’t last long in or near an established forest. They need a fire to clear the way for them. Seedlings do show up at times but I’ve not seen one since I started on iNat in June, probably because I usually walk the same route on my daily visits. When I do see one I’ll make an observation.
Thanks. I’ve been digging through old threads and will keep an eye out.
I get the fact that cultivated has a particular, technical meaning in a professional context, but the question “Was it captive/cultivated?” suggests some sort of equivalence that is rooted in differences between the nature of organisms (motile and non-motile or however you want to structure the dichotomy), not differences in technical terminology in botany and zoology. If a zebra is wild on the veldt, captive when enclosed behind a fence in a zoo and wild again when released back onto the veldt there is no correspondence with the term cultivated as apparently employed by working botanists and horticulturists; it’s definition needs to mirror the definition of captive or it needs to be presented as something other than one half of a dichotomous pairing, which creates confusion. @tiwane
That equivalency was precisely why I had thought that a planted specimen that was later abandoned and survived was not cultivated; the plant appeared to have been “set free” or “released” to me.
But they updated the help page to show that’s not the case, so we can’t really assume that anymore, because the same section that lists the zebra on the veldt vs zoo now explicitly says that wild vs cultivated for animals may be based on the organism’s current state, but for plants is always based on that specimen’s origin.
