the community continues to advocate for the change, citing its importance for urban ecology, citizen science engagement, and data integrity. The request remains one of the most voted feature requests, with users questioning why it has not been implemented after years of discussion
217 votes. Comments since February 2019.
I totally agree, @doorstepecology !
I think we >90% agree, but I think for a couple of your rhetorical questions I come to different answers, and at the end a couple of situations which you mention seem absurd seem reasonable to me. Hope you don’t feel needled by the way my brain zooms in on disagreement or potential disagreement 
, I really do feel like we are generally very aligned.
To me - Absolutely yes. I think it’s special to get to know when plants have that history, and I think we need to keep sharing that history when we talk about those plants.
Presumably because those are wild (self-propagated). For a plant in it’s natural range which is capable of completing it’s lifecycle in a place - I would assume it’s wild unless we have access to a record otherwise. This assumption is a part of why I view an accurate record as being something quite precious and important - if we don’t share the knowledge with others as best we can, they might never be able to confidently know.
I think it depends on why it is burnt, but whilst the answer could be yes, it is an act of cultivation, I would say that it does not cultivate any individual plant. So for the purposes of the iNat distinction; I would say the plant coming up in the cultivated burnt area is wild (you can maybe see why I sometimes use “self-propagated” as a synonym of wild.) I think fire is a good grey-area to talk about, but I’m wary that we might hit some linguistic/cultural confusion. I don’t know anything about fire use in North America. If we were talking about burning a grassy system closer to my home (Australia), I’d say that we are probably going to struggle with applying dichotomous labels like wild/cultivated to the effects of a cultural practice like burning in Australia.
Well, now I’m more than curious! 
Perhaps unrelated, but might interest you: I read a paper recently that found a couple of the apparently “locally sourced seed stock” were not local https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-33720-z . Given the genetic biodiversity loss that often occurs when people plant non-local stock of local species, I’m hopeful that plantings of long-lived trees for “restoration” will eventually have their genetics checked wholesale. I don’t think it is true that restorations only stay cultivated so long as someone remembers, but I do think it’s true that openly sharing the knowledge is the cheapest way to find out.
I do think that every individual plant that was cultivated, should be marked as cultivated, and I think self-propagated is not cultivated. So I’d say yes? I don’t think this is unreasonable, but maybe some of our definitions aren’t lined up?
Our definition of a “weed” might differ (I would normally define this as a plant that is growing where it isn’t wanted, and I guess you mean introduced naturalised plants?). I’m a bit saddened to contemplate that there may be no native plants left which are wild left in Chicago. Perhaps saddened to the point of disbelief. If there truly are no self-propagating native species left in Chicago, then yes, I think the only research grade plants in that area should be weeds. (Currently, but as I said before; I also think the system should be changed so that clearly labelled cultivated plants can become research grade).
Ideally, I would hope that suspected plantings are checked for this by the observer rather than the identifier. There aren’t good records of these kinds of things in Australia, so I find myself looking up historical aerial imagery to make my best guesses. I would love it if we had records like what you are mentioning.
Even better might be if the people associated with the original planting program documented what they had installed on iNat themselves (that way the knowledge that something was planted in a place is associated with the location, rather than that knowledge being kept in the records of various institutions outside of the dataset). Plus, this way people could independently review how how things are growing, and what plantings have survived.
Cool thankyou! I’ve joined that discussion (added a big comment which may interest you) and added a vote. 
As we pointed out in the other thread, this does not automatically make plants that self-seeded in gardens wild; on the contrary.
“Reproducing on its own” is a necessary condition for wildness of plants on iNat, but not a sufficient one. In a context where humans intend the offspring of the plant to be there (as in a garden bed meant to be occupied by that plant species) and actively maintaining the bed – weeding, watering, etc. – to ensure the survival of the self-seeded plants, such offspring is not wild.
But not all planted plants are in gardens. In other contexts, where the parent plant was put there and then left to its own devices, either with no intention that it reproduce (say, a street tree) or without any explicit action taken to ensure that it reproduce or that its offspring survive in a particular place and particular way (a wildflower strip seeded and then largely abandoned except for occasional mowing), it is reasonable to consider the offspring wild, although it may be difficult in some cases to distinguish the offspring from the originally planted individuals.
I don’t think it is difficult to recognize an individual that was planted in a garden or in a pot and call it cultivated.(I happily do this in my own garden to track bloom times etc) The circumstance that led me to ask the question here was different-- an area that was certainly affected by human restoration planting, but now 4 years have passed and the populations have spread. The most hard-core answer I have seen here is only count as wild if they are annuals.
The same applies here, it’s squishy. For the sake of argument, we can rephrase/oversimplify it as:
If a native shrub, planting time unknown and presumably long-term undisturbed, has been cut into the shape of a cat, is it still capital-W Wild?
The plant individual is the same, the history is the same, but it is actively altered by people to suit people’s needs. Fire burning in NA prairies has an equivalent effect for many plants. The plant doesn’t die, they can live for decades if not centuries. But people have altered them in a particular way to suit people’s interests. Burning we pretend is natural (and certain racist assumptions about Indigenous peoples contribute to this), but topiary is very obviously not. Both are altering a living plant because people want something from it. Both plant’s wild status should reflect this consistently.
We have a few remnant woodland preserves, and obviously the kind of native plants like ragweed and lawn weeds that stick around in ruderal areas, but the only remnant prairie plants in the city of Chicago that I know of were physically moved from a destroyed prairie a few decades ago, which by this definition, are Cultivated. The rest are restorations.
Here’s a classic shot from one of the favorite parks for iNatting in Chicago. Right now, Montrose Point has 55,536 (
) observations, 12,710 of which are plants (13,092 if you include casual). Of those plant obs, the vast majority are native prairie/coastal grassland species in this W/wild lakeside prairie.
The site is built on landfill constructed in 2002, this prairie restoration started somewhere around 2005, and has been actively maintained since then, with weeding, replanting, reseeding, burning. Some of the plants in this photo are brand new, some of the plants in this photo come from seeds planted in 2005. Some of the brand new plants are freshly germinated from seeds planted in 2005, some of them are third, fourth, 20th generation seeds from last fall. Can you tell which? I can’t!
It’s worth emphasizing, this is one of the big sites where iNat people go in Chicago. This is a starting point for many naturalist journeys, including mine. This site is home to our most famous resident endangered birds. It’s a restoration! So when people blanket decide that any restoration means everything is suspect and therefore, by iNaturalist’s function “doesn’t count”, I want to put that in context of people having meaningful relationships with their local nature. If we’re nit-picking flowerhead by flowerhead, what meaningful gains are we getting?
:) If you have the budget for it, then we’ll talk
edit: omg I forgot to credit the photo. That is very much my bad.
iNat defines “wild” primarily based on whether the plant is in that location because people put it there, not whether that plant has been affected by human activity.
Yeah this is the core of what I’m interested in too! When does a restoration count as “Wild”, especially when the recent plantings and self-seeded plantings are intermingled? You’ll go mad trying to figure out which plant is new and which is old, and the distinction becomes impossible to tell over time.
I think this is also an issue because, barring intensive monthly study by teams of people, you will never be able to keep track of who is new or who is a returning friend of multiple years with herbaceous perennials. With trees, it’s easy, they’re always there, but herbaceous perennials that die off every winter are incredibly difficult to track.
I believe the wild shrub pruned into a topiary and the intentionally burned prairie are both wild by iNat’s definition, which is about how they got there, not whether they are being cared for or altered by people.
The turf grass someone planted in a lawn is cultivated. “Weeds” that can only grow in that lawn because it’s being mowed and watered are wild.
A wild roadside tree that has had all the limbs pruned off on the side facing the road is still wild. A row of trees planted as a hedge 200 years ago and then abandoned is still cultivated by iNat’s definition, even though no one has done any maintenance since they were planted.
Native plants that fortuitously show up in a burned prairie restoration are definitely wild. Whether the descendants of what was planted there are wild or not, might depend on whether we consider a prairie restoration a “gardening area.” There doesn’t seem to be any clear guidance on this.
