remove the invasive checkbox

[wbazant]

This view for example has small clusters:

https://beta.fallingfruit.org/map/@39.9654518,-105.4882976,13z

Toggle "invasive species only" - nothing happens. Then zoom in, and they disappear.

@ezwelty I remember we discussed the option of removing the invasive checkbox, what do you think? Shall we just not have that checkbox?

Edit: I've found https://github.com/falling-fruit/falling-fruit-web/issues/383#issuecomment-2142951728 that confirms the data's not there with the suggestion to hide it for now. I'll change this to an 'enhancement' with a proposed resolution to remove.

[ezwelty]

@wbazant Indeed, it isn't available at the cluster-level. So we could remove it, but I might suggest we disable it until a minimum zoom is reached (much like the add location button). This has the advantage of keeping the feature visible (we have a neat text to explain the invasivore concept on the live site), and other filters will probably need to be dealt with in this same way (e.g. by ripeness: https://github.com/falling-fruit/falling-fruit-api/issues/25, by access: https://github.com/falling-fruit/falling-fruit-api/issues/23).

[wbazant]

That does address the 'no data at cluster level' issue - but furthermore, I don't like the checkbox ;). I didn't want to write a big rant against it but in essence, it seemed to me like it's there to educate users about 'eating the weeds' but I think it doesn't support much meaningful UX. The user can try toggling it, and might see a few 'edible invasive' types on their map, but most likely they'll get something of limited interest, for example this is Boulder, CO:

An extra reason why I don't like the checkbox is that there's no data for my location ;). I remember the reason it's only in the US is because you've used USDA state-level data in some way.

Maybe a better way to support the same functionality - tell people to eat the weeds just as persuasively, show them invasive edibles on the map - would be a little landing page for eating the weeds, with a link to a pre-configured type filter: it would have a title like "Invasive edibles CO", a description, a default start, and a collection of types that it contains. I've only had the idea five minutes ago but how does reinventing this part of the site sound and am I missing something about how users are interacting with the feature now?

[ezwelty]

@wbazant Yes, you can remove it. The database has invasiveness data (US only) for only 75 types, so the impact is small. (Although if you had left "Tree inventories" selected, you would have seen a bunch of Russian olive trees on the map in Boulder). It can come back some day if the underlying data is improved.

Background

We were originally inspired by http://invasivore.org/ (which is currently down) and specifically Andy Deines (https://www.canr.msu.edu/people/andy-deines). There are other similar projects, like http://eattheinvaders.org/.

The website modal explains the filter this way:

What is an invasive species? Invasive plants are non-native plants in a given region that outcompete native plants. We highlight invasive plants on Falling Fruit so that you can seek them out and eat them, fighting back invasions one tasty bite at a time! Invasive species are currently only listed for the United States and based on U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) state-level noxious and invasive species lists.

A conversation I had with Andy Deines highlighted the challenge of defining what is and what is not invasive, and the difficulty of compiling a more complete geodatabase of invasive species.

Ethan: The USDA data you sent (https://plants.usda.gov/home/noxiousInvasiveSearch) is interesting. I see that while many plants are "introduced" to the Lower 48 and Canada, only a few are federally listed as a "noxious weed", and only a few plants in a few states are actually listed as "invasive". Our tasty enemy Rubus armeniacus for instance has no state listings, although it is popularly known as an invasive in the PNW. Why wouldn't Washington list Himalayan blackberry as an invasive?.

Andy: This is a very touchy subject, and the semantics drive me crazy, there is no universally accepted term. Generally there's a hierarchy "introduced" (not native but not necessarily harmful) and "invasive" (not native and caused human, economic and ecological harm), (and many other terms) but many people also avoid "invasive" and "alien" b/c of negative connotations. There's also a problem that a species could be classified as harmful and "invasive" in some contexts, but people still love them. Like cats (those little fury murder-machines http://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill). So that's probably the story with blackberry. When I lived in Washington, I definitely loved eating them, but hated their impacts. I did notice though that WA does sort of list BB as invasive (http://www.invasivespecies.wa.gov/priorities/himalayan_blackberry.shtml), but it just hasn't made it onto the USDA list b/c it's not so much an agriculture pest.

[wbazant]

All right, I'll remove it! Thanks for being open to what I was saying - I don't want to drive further nails into the project, it is just about the feature as it is right now.

Here in the UK context I can think of a couple of really good candidate types - e.g. a Three cornered leek, which I saw on a foraging channel and then found some annotations on Falling Fruit, except it's too far from me. There's also some where the concept is ineffective - Sweet cicely was technically introduced during the Roman invasion of Britain, but there's no reason to try to eradicate it and it's not possible anyway - or with Japanese knotweed which is an active eradication target whenever it appears somewhere but it's irresponsible to tell people to forage it: it's illegal to disturb, its spreads with bits stuck to shoes, it might have been sprayed with glyphosate.