You know well that proposals aiming at the same result have been made but there have been few reactions…
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There’s another problem with marking things “captive/cultivated.” Then they stop being “needs ID” so they will probably never get an identification. I used to rigorously mark all cultivated plants as cultivated. Now, I consider whether it seems as identified as it can be (to species in most cases, but not all). If it isn’t ID’d to species (or whatever final level I think it can reach) I don’t mark it cultivated. (I do mark it cultivated if it has only one ID, presumably mine, and I’m confident that it’s correct.)
Note: I would rather mark it cultivated, and theoretically I should, but I also want it to go on to be identified, and often I can’t get both results.
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It seems like pmeisenheimer’s solution would work, without compromising the existing data. Perhaps ti should be done.
Note: I personally don’t have a problem with the current set-up because I treat the captive/cultivated alternative as meaning “Is it captive or cultivated? [depending on taxon] or is it not?” Seems clear, though, that some people do have problems with it. Interesting how different minds work.
I have taken your post as a suggestion that a feature request be put on the table and I have submitted one for moderation. If it’s approved I’ll post a link here. I’m not sure how much support there is for this but I guess we’ll see.
It really is fascinating how differently people process language.
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Recently, a section of naturally-occurring forest had been cut down to make room for more houses in my neighborhood. Only a birch tree was spared due to its beautiful bark. A lawn was laid around the birch, and a house was built behind it. If I did not know the history of this specific tree, I would assume it was planted by people.
This tree is in the same spot it has always been for decades, but the forest around it is now gone. Is this tree still wild or is it now considered cultivated?
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That is the situation my parents’ house (they even built the house on an angle on the lot to preserve as many trees as possible).
I think they could be argued to be cultivated because they are managed along with the rest of the lawn, but per iNat’s definition they are wild.
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Wild, as with a grown tree it’s not much you can do to it to make it cultivated, trimming doesn’t make it more adapted that means it doesn’t get more adapted to the place than before, and nether the less if it was a weed and we’d pull away other weeds around it, it would have benefits, but would we call this weed cultivated because of that? No.
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Yes, there are always exceptions but should exceptions stop users from marking observations of likely non-wild organisms?
There are users who are interested in non-wild organisms and often identify many of these observations. I think that flagging these observations is the lesser of two evils
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I agree trees are challenging sometimes. There was an oak in my neighborhood that was here long before houses were built. Given its diameter it was probably here before South Carolina achieved statehood. I had marked it casual, but now I think I need to mark it wild.
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Trimming might not, but being watered in times of drought, being treated for diseases and pest, and all the other advantages it receives by being part of the cultivated landscape do benefit even trees that are already grown.
I’ve never heard anyone doing it to a big non-fruit tree, if it dies it dies even for planted ones.
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People don’t water their lawns if there are big non-fruiting trees?
There’s no difference between that and watering weeds between flowers, so no, it doesn’t make them cultivated. If there’s no intention it doesn’t change wild status.
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In the non-academic world, there are two ways to remove wild status: remove the organism from the wild (as in the iNat zebra’s case) or; remove the wild from the organism (as in the example of the birch tree described by @bobby23 ). The birch tree is only wild in the most technical, academic sense of the word and not in the sense of wild that is employed by the overwhelming majority of English speakers.The definition of cultivated used by iNat is arbitrary and although it may be consistent with the definition employed in publications in some research fields it fails to reflect the most commonly accepted, vernacular sense of wildness. The iNat definition is in place and we are stuck with it for the sake of data consistency. In truth, concepts of wildness are all pretty arbitrary, given the ecological interconnectedness of all life on Earth. It is still important to understand the limits of the definition from both common usage and ecological perspectives and to understand the confusion this can create when posting observations, particularly given the inconsistency of the logical basis for the non-wild designations used for animal and plant observations.
To be clear, if a wild zebra had lived in the forest described by @bobby23 and it had been fenced into a tiny plot on somebody’s lawn because somebody thought it was pretty then maintained by water from a hose and feed pellets from a bag, nobody would post pictures of it without a captive designation. It is kind of silly that the birch tree gets treated differently, data quality issues notwithstanding.
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I can see that point (from an iNat standpoint), but then again, does the act of noticing a weed and NOT trying to eradicate it imply acceptance and inclusion into the yard?
e.g., If I pull up catchweed but make a conscious decision to leave dandelions (or birch trees, as in @bobby23 's example) then haven’t I effectively chosen to include them into the landscaping?
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To be fair (and to be a pendant 
)…they’re being “tagged” as cultivated/captive, not “flagged”.
Flags on Inat are for bringing attention of some authority (staff, curators, etc) to something that is wrong (bad behavior, incorrect taxa, etc). Tagging as not wild doesn’t do that.
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I’m sure I’ve sad it elsewhere, but I think these discussions often get bogged down by edge cases those are not particularly helpful, IMO.
The captive/cultivated or wild/not wild part of the DQA is there to separate the vast majority of observations that can clearly be marked one way or the other, and I think it works fine for that. Yes, not something new users will see or understand, but to me that’s an onboarding issue, plus just a general issue that most people don’t make the distinction, it’s all just “nature”.
It helps anyone use iNaturalist to see where species occur in the “wild”, it helps those of us who don’t want to see observations of garden plants or pets to avoid them, and it helps those who want to see them find them. If there are outliers, those can still be surfaced by anyone looking at maps or data exports and the community can discuss it.
If there are questionable situations, go by the definition provided:
Checking captive / cultivated means that the observation is of an organism that exists in the time and place it was observed because humans intended it to be then and there. Likewise, wild / naturalized organisms exist in particular times and places because they intended to do so (or because of intention of another wild organism).
And, as @kestrel and @rebeccafay say when training for City Nature Challenge, use your best judgement if it’s not totally clear. State your reasoning and discuss in a civil manner.You might convince others, or you might not.
Regarding splitting captive/cultivated - my preference would be to present Wild: yes/no when creating new observations, but that presents its own problems, meaning that on Android and the web, the checkbox would be filled by default and you would have to un-check it if it’s not wild, which is not great UI (at least to me and some other staff members).
Finally, annotations are not linked to data quality, so I didn’t approve the request to make annotations for these terms.
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Extreme instances make useful examples because the contrasts are sharp and the logic is clear, not because the logic is flawed. Part of the confusion in question is the inconsistency of the perceived meanings of captive and cultivated, at least for some users, and clear examples of breakdowns in the system are informative. People are trying to understand the rules, live by the rules and contribute to thinking about how things could work better and part of that conversation is about whether we all understand and agree on what the rules are, including rules defining where the edges are.
The point of iNat is learning about biodiversity and discussing what wild means is a legitimate part of that conversation. If definitions are inconsistent or fail to account for the observed range of phenomena then that is worth knowing.
Call up a list of observations for Garden Tulips in North America and check the wild/cultivated status. I stopped after the first 20 and all showed as wild, including at least 2 that were clearly indoors and may have been cut flowers. I recently received a notification of an observation by a prolific, competent observer for another species in New York’s Central Park which made note of the fact that it had been planted and mulched but was not checked as cultivated. Are there metrics on how “fine” it is working? I expect that there’s a significant amount of stuff misassigned either by poor understanding or failure to complete the forms and that clearer interfaces would reduce that.
Even without the metaphysical issues regarding whether the word intent means anything when applied to a fern, this description is not terribly helpful. The birch tree described by @bobby23 did not “intend” to be in the middle of a manicured suburban lawn, which is the “there” that was imposed on it by humans without its position shifting at all.
Sure. That works.
Use the current interface and change the wording to “Organism is not wild.” It will mess with the neatness of the column of checkmarks but does anybody care?
On the other hand, the current system uses a de facto checkmark in wild and nobody has a problem with that. I understand the UI thinking but it gets a tad dogmatic when possible solutions are abandoned to protect the prevailing orthodoxy. If “good enough” is an acceptable standard for definitions of wildness its good enough for UI.
OK.
And to end by going off topic, wildness is a cultural concept, not a scientific phenomenon and the particular notion of wildness we’re talking about is a post Industrial Revolution European idea. I’ve been thinking about a recent topic in which the idea of better incorporating Indigenous conventions into iNat was discussed and wondering how that would work in the context of this topic. The concept of wildness used in iNat is inconsistent with the perspectives of many cultures, particularly Indigenous cultures in which the natural world is not seen as external to the human world - a perspective that is essentially ecosystem based. I get the need for consistent data but if the objective is to extend the iNat project to new people around the world it would be wise to think about the cultural assumptions that are built into its structures and definitions.
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That’s where our big beautiful community comes in! Pick a species in an area where it is (almost?) always cultivated or captive, and start marking them off. (Being careful, of course, to watch for potentially naturalized occurrences.) It’s most efficient to do this using filters in the Identify modal, and using the X keyboard shortcut while arrowing through the observations.
This is something the community has to help with because, as Tony noted, captive/cultivated is…
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