Planted in Indonesia
One of the issues that we are coming across with this effort to improve the data on wild flowering plants is that a lot of observations of plants that are planted (not naturally occurring) still need to be tagged. iNaturalist rules that even exotic species are eligible for Research Grade, but only if they have spread themselves (eg the seedling of a planted tree). There are quite a few planted specimens turning up as Research Grade in iNaturalist.
Of course, it's fine to add these observations, they just need to be tagged appropriately.
If as an identifier, you spot an observation of a pot plant or a street tree, as well as marking it 'not wild', it would be super if you also point the users to the new project - e.g. "Your observation will appear in the new project https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/planted-in-indonesia , where users can help one another to identify garden and house plants, street trees, crops and so on. Please do feel free to join. "
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I regularly help identify species in Indonesia and i always tag observations as captive/cultivated but only if they are obviously so. I believe that the attitude should be that observations are assumed to be wild unless it is explicit/obvious that they are not. Locals do tend to plant useful plant in seemingly "wild" areas for food or medicine and these plants might spread by themselves like this pineapple i found in a disturbed forest: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/28050969.
People who upload cultivated plants without tagging them are mostly new users, they simply need to be told that it is important to tag observations as captive/cultivated if they are so. In case anyone needs it, this is my usual response in indonesian, which is more or less a translation from the inat's frequent responses (https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/responses#notwild):
Selamat datang di inaturalist! Situs ini terutama digunakan untuk mengobservasi flora/fauna liar. Untuk hewan dan tanaman peliharaan/ternak mohon untuk mencentang kolom captive/cultivated ketika anda mengupload agar jelas bahwa observasi tersebut bukan hewan atau tanaman liar. Terima kasih!
Agreed, its not the species, its the context. If I'm not sure I leave a note asking the observer to flag if it does happen to be cultivated. I have noticed that this is a much bigger issue for the observations in India, probably because a handful of active users like yourself have been making such efforts to communicate with new users in Indonesia.
Thank you so much for sharing the translation! Terima kasih!
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