City Nature Challenge 2018: A Win For Urban Nature Around the World
May 4, 2018
Which city in the world can observe the most nature? This is the question staff at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and California Academy of Sciences tried to answer earlier this week through a global effort called the City Nature Challenge.
Turns out the winning city was San Francisco--maybe the Giants beating the dodgers 3 out of 4 games over the City Nature Challenge weekend was a harbinger of SF’s winning streak!
Last year collectively we made 124,092 new wildlife observations of 8557 species. These numbers represented the five biggest days the iNaturalist community had ever clocked! Until this year’s challenge got underway!
In just 4 short days over 17,000 people managed to record 441,888 observations from around the world, and smashed the previous biggest day records.
Here's a breakdown of the top three cities in each category:
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!
A few more breakdowns:
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
It really goes to show what an impact we can make collectively. Thanks to everyone who participated this year, and stay tuned for next year because the City Nature Challenge is going international!