Students in Boise, Idaho participated in the City Nature Challenge at a local park.
What is the City Nature Challenge?
The City Nature Challenge is an international effort for people to find and document plants and wildlife in cities across the globe. It’s a bioblitz-style competition where cities are in a friendly contest with each other to see who can make the most observations of nature, who can find the most species, and who can engage the most people.
If you’re a regular IdEEA reader, you’ve likely seen previous discussions about the City Nature Challenge and the opportunities it provides to connect citizens to local biodiversity issues. If you are interested in expanding these community science surveys to your area in 2024, here are some important dates and training to get you started.
The 2024 City Nature Challenge dates are:
April 26 - 29: making observations
April 30 - May 5: time to get all observations uploaded into iNaturalist & work on identifying species
May 6: results announced!
A student uploads an image from the school garden into the iNaturalist app for identification.
Become an organizer for your city or local organization!
New organizers are invited to attend an information meeting covering:
What the City Nature Challenge is
How the CNC is run/organized
What being an organizer entails
Guidelines you'll need to follow and milestones you'll need to complete
Bring your questions for the Q&A at the end!
These meetings help you make an informed decision whether or not there is time and people-power to organize your city for the City Nature Challenge before the final deadline in mid-November. All three meetings cover the same information so you only need to attend one.
These new organizer meetings will be held:
Tuesday, 19 September at 1pm PDT / 20:00 UTC
Wednesday, 20 September at 8 AM PDT / 15:00 UTC
Thursday, 21 September at 4pm PDT / 23:00 UTC
(Note: these meetings will be in English. We will try to schedule a meeting in Spanish soon!)
You can sign up for one of the meetings using this online spreadsheet. (When you sign up, be sure to scroll down and click an EMPTY cell under the "Name" column BEFORE you start typing. Links to the Zoom meeting and agenda will be e-mailed to you and added to the spreadsheet closer to the meeting dates.)
We HIGHLY recommend attending one of these meetings if you're a new CNC organizer. If you cannot make any of the meetings, please sign up on the spreadsheet linked above to receive the recording of the meeting (to the right of Reunión en español).
Students use hula hoops to collect biodiversity data in random locations along the river for the City Nature Challenge.