Can my post perhaps be moved there? It seems to not really be repeating anything.
How a person can count how long those plants were there? Unless they did it themselves it’s impossible in most situations. And status of being planted is a forever one, it’s both easier and logical, tree is planted even a thousand years after, cause the spot is the same, unlike animals it can’t walk away from where a human brought it.
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It’s easier to estimate or guess how long a plant has been untended than to figure out if a 50-year-old tree was planted. This is not a perfect solution, of course - there isn’t one. But the current definition of “Cultivated” is subject to the same complaint - how can you tell if something was once planted if it’s growing in a “wild” setting and you didn’t plant it yourself?
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Could you provide examples? Cause if it’s growing in the wild, e.g. tree, you can easily see the pattern in each trees were planted (rows), I have a bgi patch of planted forest (oldest are around 80y-old) near my house, it looks wild, but at the certain angle you can see rows of firs. So easy solution is just not observe older plants, there’re always a lot of small, young ones of the same species, and they’re totally wild. Another thing you can have an exotic tree, plant it and abandon, it then can grow on its own, but why would you consider it wild? Yes, it was never watered at all, but it is there not on its own.
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Where I live, nearly all the forests are planted but the trees are not in rows because crews working on the steep slopes can’t walk in straight lines.
I photo mainly the smaller plants that moved in on their own, but if I do photo a Douglas-Fir, I just treat it as wild. There’s always the chance it might be, though odds are against it.
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I hesitate to get involved in this topic because Plants are not my thing. However, this observation (https://inaturalist.ca/observations/14319479) I would consider wild. I know where it likely came from - dumping from a garden across the road - but it is now on it’s own. It lives among wild plants, and has to fend for itself. It will either live or die depending on climate, nutrients or competition. Once humans stop caring for some life form, it is essentially wild.
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Botanists put plants growing from dumped garden trash, seed blowing off trucks, etc., in the category “waifs.” We treat them as part of the flora sort of. Seems fair enough to treat them as wild here.
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But it is not necessarily cultivated a thousand years after. The plants on a long-abandoned homesite may have been planted; but ever since that homesite was abandoned, their survival, or not, has been on their own ability to compete and sustain themselves.
But it has survived on its own, whereas another might not have. Untended trees are subject to the same vicissitudes of survival as wild ones.
For iNat wild = got there by its own, you don’t know if it would survive if it was planted as a seed, and it’s not a natural way of things, it’s an alien ogranism in this spot taking it from something that could grow there without human help. Otherwise all trees in cities would be wild, nobody is taking care of them as if they were roses, only cut them when they’re getting too close to windows or wires. But would anyone call those rows of birches wild?
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It is truly unfortunate and misleading that iNat has chosen to ‘translate’ Not Wild to Cultivated
iNat should simply say what it means NOT Wild
But that is on another thread in the forum
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Many complaints I’ve seen involve trees in a park which appear wild - they are growing in a random pattern. However, sometimes the park creator planted them that way on purpose, so by the current definition they are not wild. If these trees were subsequently pruned up until the time of observation, I would still consider them cultivated, but if the trees and surrounding vegetation were left untended then they’re wild.
That’s my whole point. If it was never watered at all, but grew on its own, it had to work just as hard for its survival as the nonplanted trees around it. We should be treating exotic plants the same way as exotic animals - iNat considers animals that were previously pets but are now feral to be wild, so plants that were once cultivated but are now growing on their own should also be considered wild.
But animals can move and change location on their will, but plants can’t, if they could they’d be treated the same I guess.
So just because plants aren’t animals, you think they shouldn’t be treated the same way? You do have a point, but I disagree. Yes, animals move, but plants still have to work to survive. Animals must find food quickly, plants have to do the same by growing their roots out. I suppose you could say that where a plant is growing makes a big enough difference to consider it “cultivated”, but not every planted tree survives, just as not every naturally-seeded tree survives. When a tree-planting group plants hundreds of young trees and leaves them to fend for themselves, they’re basically simulating the natural regrowth of a forest - which would happen slower, but in the same place. The trees from that planting are quite possibly not in rows, are growing in a natural habitat, and only some will survive. When that forest is 50 years old, who’s going to call it “cultivated”?
Hi @fluffyinca, the iNaturalist guidelines are pretty clear on planted trees - to mark as “not wild” (“captive/cultivated”), regardless of when they were planted. You can see more info in the FAQ page that was linked earlier.
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Sorry, I’m not discussing how to use the current system, I’m proposing a change to the guidelines because your definition of “cultivated” seems less than perfect. (Well, it’ll never be perfect. But you know what I mean.)
I think planted trees should be considered cultivated, however long they’ve survived in that location. However, I must admit that I treat our Douglas-Firs, dominant plant in our forest, as wild. In the many cases where I don’t know, I call it wild. In cases where the original plant was planted but it’s spreading by rhizomes or roots and putting up new shoots, I treat the younger shoots as wild.
This topic is regarding a question about how to treat planted plants in the current system on iNaturalist. I think that’s been pretty well answered and the conversation seems to be going in circles. If you have a proposal for a change to the system, please check past requests, and if it hasn’t been made before, you can submit a new one. Thanks!
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