BiodiverCity Challenge comes to Calgary for 2021

This weekend, from Thursday June 10 through Sunday June 13, Calgary will be taking part in the BiodiverCity Challenge. This is a bioblitz like the recent City Nature Challenge, wherein participants can upload observations of any living thing within the Calgary city limits, and the surrounding areas of Airdrie, Chestermere, Cochrane, Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park, and the Town of Okotoks. 

As in the City Nature Challenge, observations can be uploaded to the iNaturalist app or web page, but can also be uploaded to NatureLynx. The NatureLynx app and web page page were set up by Alberta naturalists just for biological observations of this sort, and were used in the BiodiverCity Challenge last year in Edmonton. Once again, Edmonton will be taking part this year.

So take lots of photos this weekend – not just of birds, but insects, mammals, plants; everything – and upload them to one of the sites. It will be interesting to see the difference between what we find in June here versus the results of the City Nature Challenge in late April.

You can follow the progress of the Challenge on the project page on iNaturalist here.