Muddying the waters here further, but I wish there were a naturalized designation. Being cultivated in a garden versus being cultivated in a natural setting with a 100 year harvest cycle would seem to fix some of the problems with the lack of research grade for the “captive/cultivated” category.
Naturalized designates both wild and cultivated making for clarity for real world circumstances.
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I don’t understand. What are you proposing here?
Have an additional designation as to provenance.
Wild
Naturalized
Captive/cultivated
Pretty simple.
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This was in response to a comment I made on the original thread about not being able to mark plants as cultivated when they are replanted after a restoration project with plants originally native to an area or planted on a long term cycle for posterity or future harvest.
Marking as captive/cultivated in plants is frustratingly complex.
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What does “Natualized” mean? There may be a few gray areas between wild and captive for animals (ex. escapees, bison, ect.) but there are no gray areas for plants - any plants is either wild or cultivated. The same would be true for animals, too, if the staff gave us more clear rules.
“Naturalized” has a specific meaning that operates at the population level, referring to populations that are established and reproducing on their own in a location where they are not native, and generally used for those species not observed to be so aggressive as to be regarded as invasive. It does not relate to whether or not an individual organism was planted or seeded in spontaneously, which is what the DQA is supposed to delineate.
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I live in the Sequoia National Forest. The largest trees have been harvested and continue to be harvested. Now the young stock are burning. Timber companies replant from locally sourced seed or from stock not necessarily in the same genome. So a rocky mountain Ponderosa genome could replace the Sierra genome depending on the nursery providing the trees. Naturalized is a sticky issue. You can’t tell which is native and which is not. I know a sequoia grove that was planted in the 1880 in an area about 15 miles south of the southernmost grove. That is over 140 years old and is a firm example of a cultivated plot, but if it has no human intervention is it really? When does it become naturalized? How do we know about how much indigenous peoples transplanted plants.
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The sequioas that were planted in 1880 would never be considered “wild” under iNat definitions. Any descendants that seed in from those trees would be considered “wild.” Obviously with some individuals in some settings we can really only make the best inference available and lack perfect knowledge. Whether or not they would be regarded as “naturalized” the way it’s generally used is a separate question that’s not directly related to iNat DQA.
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I don’t see the usefulness between distinguishing between wild and naturalized. Both are “wild” in the sense that they reproduce on their own.
Take a look at this paper
https://doc.rero.ch/record/24725/files/bach_puf.pdf
Blackburn, T. M., Pyšek, P., Bacher, S., Carlton, J. T., Duncan, R. P., Jarošík, V., … & Richardson, D. M. (2011). A proposed unified framework for biological invasions. Trends in ecology & evolution , 26 (7), 333-339.
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Ecologically for restoration, wild versus naturalized has enormous significance as to provenance. Naturalized dedicates it as a reproducing population that was introduced by humans. Ecologically it is very important. For perennials and annuals it becomes a matter of if they are necessary to control. A plant in a Mediterranean habitat planted in a wetter climate can easily become an invasive species. A sequoia outside of native groves is naturalized but the grove I speak of is in an entirely different county, it matters.
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Also, the parrots in the United States except two are all naturalized. they are not native to the country. Yet the Red-crowned Parrot is endangered in its native range but the Los Angeles population could and should be considered refugia, as that population exceeds the population in its native range.
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So, naturalized just means introduced? iNat already distinguishes between native and introduced species on place checklists. I’m not sure why you would want a separate quality grade for them.
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No, it does not mean introduced. It means an extremely important ecological step removed from introduced.
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Never, it’s cultivated forever. Your proposal imo will just add more shade areas and confusion, even forum members can’t really understand what you mean by naturalized, regular users won’t have any idea.
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Sad that popularity drives this without consideration to science. I guess I shouldn’t bother to try to elevate anything beyond sound bite science. Done.
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The primary purpose of this site is to create a community of naturalists, any science that comes out of it is just a bonus.
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Feral?
Anyone interested with such data will have to revisit every observation anyway, it will be as working as cultivated now, where probably most of cultivated plants are not marked as so.
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Cultivated, is probably accurate.
But, as you said, a lot of ‘wild’ is not yet marked as cultivated.
Then there’s a grey area for introduced.
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I understand that, but it’s often very hard to tell in the field whether one tree was planted, is an escape/waif, or is on the edge of a naturalized population. Trying to discern this from a photo is nearly impossible.
I think for the purposes of iNat, the little pink icon at the top of the page that says introduced is good enough to let people know that the plant is likely naturalized.
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