One of the reasons I think plants growing from rhizomes of cultivated plants can count as wild.
This is a Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) growing from a sewer grate in Iowa some 35 years ago.
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Hmm, you make an interesting point, but as others have already mentioned, what about pests that can survive thanks to microhabitats humans created for human use?
That said I think you may have a good idea with the âcommensalâ thing. Theyâre there because of humans (i.e. not necessarily ânaturalâ range), but humans didnât put them there intentionally (i.e. not captive/cultivated).
@fffffffff While iNat is not strictly a scientific site, it is also meant to provide a bunch of essentially publicly-crowdsourced data on species distributions (and more). So, I agree with @sedgequeen in that it makes sense to think of iNat as a scientifc site and try to tailor site rules toward being useful for scientific research.
I donât think the wild vs. captive/cultivated dichotomy by itself is ever gonna be perfect and I think we can broadly agree that thereâs a lot of grey area. Anyone studying invasive species should know to be on the lookout for both false positives and false negatives.
Iâm amused by the sheer volume of grey-area cases that threads like these generate, I gotta say.
I agree, and as a sidenote, I think that it makes sense to see humans as part of nature â sure, there are the animals and plants we intentionally raise and care for, but our actions also affect nature in unintentional ways that change âwhat nature isâ, basically. We create habitats for ourselves and the things we care about (including ourselves), but that often also means creating habitats for other things, which still count as habitats.
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Itâs not what the truth of iNat is, it wouldnât focus on number of users vs. the quality of their observations, captive observations wouldnât be a thing at all, or be very rare occurance, observations could be deleted by moderators for e.g. not containing any info or id in it (blank, too blurry), etc. People using iNat see that the website is not focused on the scientific side, hell, staff say duplicate observations are ok for them, no scientist would say that, thereâs just too much to list that shows what iNat really is, how you or other observers use it is a different story, personal one.
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The âtruthâ of what iNat is itâs both a site for the public to post observations of nature and a site that generates scientifically useful data.
The data are not necessarily in perfect, cleaned-up condition, but that doesnât mean that the site doesnât or shouldnât have a scientific mission or at least try to make itself useful for science.
For that matter, the site is a very useful tool for science education (and it is frequently used as such), so it actually makes sense for this to be a place where people who donât have as much background in the sciences can be exposed to scientific considerations.
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Those are not news for me, site rules already have enough of that, and staff said many times theyâre not really supporting many of proposals that would make science aspect better, so please donât try to talk me into accepting iNat as scientific data gatherer, I already use it for serious purposes, but I look realistically at current situation.
I just think that makes sense to acknowledge that iNaturalist, at present, serves as both an informal nature enthusiast site and a âcitizen scienceâ source of scientifically-useful data, even though it is obviously not a perfect source of scientific data. (It also serves other purposes too, such as being an educational tool.)
(In saying this, I am not implying whether any specific changes are/arenât likely to, or should/shouldnât, be implemented.)
Edit: someone else pointed out to me that this line of discussion isnât on-topic here, so I should probably stop with this. (Sorry about it!)
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Oh, this flower is one that I planted myself? But itâs a species that I really, reaallly want to add to my life list, so: Iâll come up with a âgray areaâ to fit it into.
I canât really see humans as being a âpart of natureâ unless theyâre living in an almost completely natural way. Which means they would have to be living without electricity & plumbing, modern medicine and healthcare, modern technology, you name itâŚ
I meant that human activities affect nature and nature is not excluded from interacting with the things we do, such as making use of the infrastructure we build, so it makes sense to classify commensal species (and similar things, like pests) that depend on human-controlled microhabitats to survive (in ways not intended by humans) as âwildâ â or, more accurately, as âneither captive nor cultivatedâ, which right now means theyâre counted as wild.
(Sorry, I probably didnât phrase it clearly.)
To be fair, for proper accounting of such observations, I would have to think about how to specify the location of, for example, a cockroach stowaway that was discovered on a cruise ship while itâs in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. (Given that said cockroach is likely to be dead by the time it reaches the port of arrival, I would probably just peg the location as the port of departure, but Iâm not entirely sure about this myself.)
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