The event continues until midnight on Monday May 2.
Posted by Bob Lefebvre
The first two days of the City Nature Challenge are complete and so far we have over 400 species reported from over 2,500 observations. I’m sure many observers (like me) have taken quite a few photos that they haven’t had time to post to iNaturalist yet, so the numbers for the first two days will increase, and we still have two days to go. Participants have until 9am on May 9 to upload their photos, so please don’t think you can’t participate because you won’t have time. Try to take a few photos of each organism so it is easier for the iNaturalist AI and for other participants to identify.
You can take photos of any living thing – birds, other animals, plants, even bacteria if you are able to! Good quality photos are important, but for many birds and animals the photos only have to be good enough to identify, which is often easy even with distant or blurry photos, so don’t hesitate to capture a bird’s photo because you can’t get a perfect shot. Common species like House Sparrows and dandelions should be recorded as well as more “interesting” species.
This is a planet-wide event with hundreds of cities taking part. There are forty-two Canadian municipalities participating this year. Of course every city has a different set of species, but we can “compete” to see how many people take part, how many observations we make, and how many species we record – even if it’s not a level playing field. In Calgary we have taken pride in leading the country in the number of observations we have made during past CNC’s.
This year, we have a little work to do to catch up to Toronto for total observations. The stats at the top of the page are for the whole country. (See the iNaturalist project page for Canada.)
You might also like to see how the worldwide challenge is going – some incredible numbers from La Paz, Hong Kong, and (as always) Cape Town. See the page here for a complete list of cities and their progress.
In case you have any questions about how the challenge works, here is a quick FAQ from the City Nature Challenge main website.
Please get out and help to log the biodiversity of the Calgary area!