City Nature Challenge 2018: Austin's Journal

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This year's City Nature Challenge was AMAZING! Almost 70 cities around the world, all mobilizing their residents and visitors to go out and find and document their local nature. The energy and enthusiasm for the City Nature Challenge was once again amazing- watching hundreds of thousands of observations flow in from around the world was truly inspiring. Our collective impact was obvious and incredible - we also gave iNaturalist its biggest 4 days in a row EVER!

Here are the results of the City Nature Challenge (as of 9:00 a.m., May 4 in each city’s time zone):
All 68 cities together:
Observations: 441,888
People: 17,329

All 63 cities using iNaturalist:
Observations: 423,845
Species: 18,116
People: 16,544

We also made 4,075 Research Grade observations of 599 rare, endangered, and threatened species globally, and added over 100 new species that had not previously been recorded on iNaturalist EVER!

Congratulations to our top five observers, species-finders, and identifiers across ALL the City Nature Challenge cities:
Observers: @krentan, @thary, @danielatha, @affan1990, @ecologist
Species-finders: @anewman, @rcurtis, @finatic, @nanofishology, @sambiology
Identifiers: @jrebman, @srall, @pihlaviita, @connlindajo, @sambiology
Big shout out to @jrebman for making over 10,000 identification!!

This year it was a sweep, with the San Francisco Bay Area winning in all three categories.
Most observations: 41,737
Most species found: 3,211
Most participants: 1,532

Here's the top five in each category:

Observations
San Francisco Bay Area: 41,737
Dallas/Fort Worth Area: 34,218
San Diego County: 33,448
Klang Valley / Greater Kuala Lumpur: 25,287
Washington- D.C. Metro Area: 22,800

Species
San Francisco Bay Area: 3,211
Houston Area: 3,088
San Diego County: 2,946
Hong Kong SAR: 2,932
Dallas/Fort Worth Area: 2,560

People
San Francisco Bay Area: 1,532
San Diego County: 1,211
Boston: 992
Washington- D.C. Metro Area: 872
Los Angeles County: 855

...and some more results...
City with highest percentage of verifiable (has evidence of the organism and is not marked captive or cultivated) observations: Tulsa, Oklahoma with 98.9%
City with highest percentage of verifiable observations making it to Research Grade: Cádiz, Spain with 70.5%
City that added the most new species to their region on iNaturalist through the City Nature Challenge: Kuala Lumpur (Klang Valley), Malaysia with 1392 new species documented on iNaturalist
City that added the most new iNaturalist participants to their region through the City Nature Challenge: San Diego, California with 733 new observers added during the City Nature Challenge

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the City Nature Challenge this year! And stay tuned for next year, when the City Nature Challenge hopefully makes it to all seven continents--anyone got friends in Africa or Oceania who want to organize in 2019?

Hi everyone,

First off, AMAZING job on the City Nature Challenge this year! We are so awed by and grateful for all the time and effort you all put in to making this year's City Nature Challenge so hugely successful. Whether your city made 100 or 10,000 observations, we're all part of this collective effort to help bring awareness to urban biodiversity and grow our naturalist community who cares about nature everywhere. We know that we've taught people about species around them they didn't know existed, shown people how to participate in collecting data for science and management, and hopefully created new stewards of nature. THANK YOU!!!!

We wanted to remind all of you that we're now in the "uploading and identifying" phase of the City Nature Challenge. Your CNC participants can continue to upload their observations, as long as they were made in the April 27-30 window. We also have these few days to give people time to look at observations and work on confirming or refining the identifications. If you haven't used it yet, definitely click the "Observations" tab near the top of your city's CNC project on iNaturalist and then click the "identify" button to see all the observations that still need IDs to help them get to research grade.

Whatever your numbers are at 9am your time on Friday will be your "final" numbers for the results of the City Nature Challenge! We'll announce the "big" results: observations, species, and people, on Friday. And we'll send out more detailed and nuanced results that dive a bit deeper into the data by Monday and will highlight many of the cities!

As you're going through observations, if you see any interesting ones - rare/endangered species, great photos, observations with great stories, etc., please add them to our interesting finds spreadsheet! The media loves hearing about particular observations that are unique or important or interesting, and we'd love to have many to share from all over the world: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZRQtep9gzUK3sN2QgkFuV4xhb_YhZtGd3CMSlzszYf4/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks to all of you again - we are so appreciative of everything you've done in support of the City Nature Challenge, and we couldn't have worked with a better group of people - you all are incredible!

Lila, Alison, and Amy
CNC Coordinators

Greetings to all of you in Austin.
Now the real work begins. Verification of all the observations. If you can help, it would be great. Tonight through Thursday night, we will be at the Schlotzsky’s at 218 S. Lamar in Austin each evening from 5:30PM until 8:00PM. I will be there on Tuesday and Thursday evening and Tania Homayoun will be there on Wednesday.
We could really use your expertise. We hope to get most if not all of our Austin observations to research grade.
Please bring a laptop, if you have one.
If you can't make one of these meetings, please feel free to verify observations on your own. Every little bit helps.
Thank you all for helping with this challenge.

Marsha May
Wildlife Diversity Program
Texas Parks and Wildlife Department
4200 Smith School Road
Austin, TX 78744

Office: 512.389.8062
Cell: 512.547.9730
marsha.may@tpwd.texas.gov

Good morning from Los Angeles! I wanted to address a concern that many people have expressed about adding observations to projects. Under the new project system, you don't need to manually add your observations to the project - it actually won't allow you to. Any observations made within the boundary of the project will automatically be added. Don't worry if you don't see them right away; it may take a few minutes. Rest assured, they will be counted!

I'm sorry for the confusion and frustration about this matter. Please share this with your project participants and let them know that their observations are being counted!

I wish you all a good day of bioblitzing.

-Amy

Amy Jaecker-Jones
Coordinator, Community Science Program - City Nature Challenge
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
ajaecker@nhm.org

Join the City Nature Challenge April 27-20! citynaturechallenge.org

Greetings to all of you in Austin.
The City Nature Challenge is around the corner. It starts at 12:01AM this Friday and goes until midnight on Monday. I know that many of you are planning events for this year’s City Nature Challenge in the Austin area. This is going to be an exciting year and I know that we have a great chance of being on top of the leaderboard.
After Monday, April 30, begins the real work. Verification of all the observations. If you can help, it would be great. We are planning to hold three evening verification gatherings May 1 – 3 at the Schlotzsky’s at 218 S. Lamar in Austin each evening from 5:30PM until 8:00PM. I will be there on Tuesday and Thursday evening and Tania Homayoun will be there on Wednesday.
We could really use your expertise. We hope to get most if not all of our Austin observations to research grade.
Marsha May
Wildlife Diversity Program
Texas Parks and Wildlife Department
4200 Smith School Road
Austin, TX 78744

Office: 512.389.8062
Cell: 512.547.9730
marsha.may@tpwd.texas.gov

Calling all naturalists in and around Austin! We need YOU! This year's City Nature Challenge is on April 27 - 30, so you can go anywhere within the range (as seen in the above map on the project page) and make observations that will count this year. This is a competition among 65 cities in 15 different countries around the world. Can Texas compete? We think so! But we need your help. Any and all observations count, but the most valuable observations are made on public property (parks, right-of-ways, preserves, etc...) and are of wild (non-cultivated/not captive) organisms. Other observations count, of course, but the wild organisms found on public property can influence management and policy. Wherever you are, observe some things on April 27 - 30! Observations have to be uploaded before May 4 to count as well.

There is a global website here: http://citynaturechallenge.org/ Hopefully we'll have a TX website as well -- stay tuned!

Tagging some of the big users around Austin -- please tag others that you think would also want to participate. It's also quite fun to get together with others and deeply explore an area -- connect with some of the other naturalists in the area! :)