Understood. I picked garden tulip to make a point. The point is not that tulips are an issue but that the use of the captive/cultivated checkoff is an issue. Fixing tulips is relatively simple, although some of them are naturalized. The big problem is those species where cultivation is not obvious or at least the most obvious option. The fact that every single one of the tulip observations I looked at was listed as wild says that the current system is not being used properly. I don’t want to keep beating on this but I am puzzled that it is apparently not seen as something to be discussed.
I am also aware that changes to who gets to edit observations may be afoot. I believe that there is a proposal to tighten permissions for making changes to observations which could restrict the correction of this sort of thing. How do you see this affecting things?
I think Tony’s point was more that it has already been discussed plenty. You can start with this forum search to see many past threads.
Yep, that always has been and always will be a big problem. Not much we can do except our best with the evidence at hand. Because of the visibility consequences of marking something captive/cultivated, my benefit of the doubt always goes to being wild/naturalized, unless the evidence and/or circumstances are pretty convincing for captive/cultivated.
That’s not something I have heard about. Can you provide any links to learn more?
It means only those user weren’t tought to use the system properly, not otherwise, I talk with people once and never see non-marked cultivated stuff from them again. With more automatic messages it would be more successful, but it’s not that the system is not working. Each region needs a community of professionals who would be reviewing things as international community can’t look at millions of observations.
Even better would be to increase the reporting and reporting accuracy of captive/cultivated observations by the observer, which is where this discussion began.
Setting aside the issues with wildness definitions, part of the issue is probably the nature of the process. The captive/cultivated check box is a DQA item but it’s a bit of an afterthought, a small checkbox down below Notes and the Location is public/obscured/private setting on the sidebar and not in the individual observation boxes at all for bulk uploaded entries. Moving it to a position between Species Name and Date and/or increasing the checkbox to the same height as the entry boxes for Species, Date and Location would undoubtedly help. Anyway, a simple reminder identifying which DQA items have not been completed before a record is accepted would undoubtedly improve reporting.
Personally, I am interested in where plants, and plant populations, occur without them having been planted there by humans. The term “cultivated” is not clear if it is intended to ask if a plant was planted by a human in the physical location it is now in. (If a human poops some berry seeds in the forest, I wouldn’t call that “planted”.) In English the term “cultivated” is used in at least 2 ways, one way suggests a “cultivar” of a species, a genetic variation of a species that was genetically altered by people selecting features they prefer over unknown numbers of generations, so that the “cultivar” differs from wild populations of that species. A second way “cultivated” is used, is to describe a plant that has been tended by humans, with things such as watering, weeding, pruning, pest control. Neither use asks if a plant is an individual, or part of a population, that came to that physical location without a human having planted it there. I don’t think iNaturalist should ask if a plant is “cultivated”. Instead, I think iNaturalist should ask if it was “planted”.