Congratulations Everyone, We had a great set of results posting first in Canada for observations and species.

Thank you to the organizers of the MVRD team this year! This was a fun challenge, and I enjoyed the excuse to get out and explore our parks a bit more than usual (okay, a lot more).

I do think there's a lot to think about in terms of how the challenge went for various cities. While Vancouver and Montréal were about evenly matched in terms of observations, it's notable that their community engagement was much stronger than ours. I did wonder whether Montréal's larger population might account for some of that, and I like thinking about data, so I did what I enjoy doing with these sorts of things and crunched some numbers.

Here is a table of the "top" Canadian city project results, normalized by population and by area. Basically, this shows us how many observations, species, and people each project got per local population and per local size of geographical area.^{See note.} I think there are some very interesting things to note here, and lots of interesting hypotheses and ideas to play with to understand these numbers.

First, I think there's a weak but perceptible trend towards less populous cities having higher community engagement. I suspect this has something to do with the different opportunities people have to interface with what they perceive as "nature" in highly urbanized versus less urban, suburban, or rural environments, and perhaps also the occupations and hobbies of people in those different types of environments.

Second, to settle the competitive question: Montréal did better at recruiting participants than Vancouver, even adjusting for their higher population size (they notably also beat out Toronto in raw numbers, which is a much larger city). They had 20.5 participants per 100,000 people in their city, while we had only 17.0. So a big congratulations to them for that! I'd love to know more about what they did to engage folks in their community, and I think it's something to learn from.

Third, I sorted this list by observers per population because I wanted to highlight something that surprised me when I made this table: Victoria, sitting at a whopping 100.1 participants per 100,000 people, way above other high-engagement cities like Halifax and London. The raw numbers from places like La Paz or Montréal can be very eye-catching, and it can be tempting to try to learn from them because of that; but population size isn't something that people thinking about community engagement with iNaturalist or with natural spaces have any control over. In terms of showcasing strength of community engagement with iNaturalist, Victoria's project was an astonishing and wonderful success. They engaged far more of their population than both smaller and larger cities, by a margin so wide I struggle to think it's just some coincidence of external factors. The Victoria project did seem fairly organized when I quickly looked into it; I suspect at least part of that huge difference was either a very successful community engagement campaign, a pre-existing high engagement with iNaturalist, or both.

I think it's also notable that while there are a lot of geographical factors that may influence the differences between Vancouver and cities east of the Rockies, like the agreeableness of climate and the seasonality of ecosystems (I suspect that's part of why Vancouver and Victoria outdid Calgary and Montréal in raw species count), Victoria is very close to Vancouver, with a similar climate, population, and culture. The fact that there was such a big difference in engagement between the two of us, and the otherwise many similarities our cities share, suggests to me that anyone looking forward to the 2025 challenge and thinking about how to engage more folks in the Lower Mainland on iNaturalist generally would be wise to look to whatever they did in Victoria this year.

Overall, a very interesting and fun event! I'd be curious to hear others' thoughts on how it went and what opportunities and challenges this raises for engaging the broader community with iNaturalist.

^Note All City Nature Challenge results are from the CNC website, while population and area data was taken from Wikipedia. I chose these as "top" cities because they all appear above the cutoff on the Canadian umbrella project leaderboards for at least one of the three result metrics. Important caveat: I had a hard time figuring out which exact formal jurisdiction mapped to the Ottawa and London projects, so those population and area figures should be taken with more salt.

Thank you both. How to improve our results is definitely front of mind now that the 2024 CNC has concluded.
I have given some preliminary thought to sorting out what could be called a lessons learned and both your sets of comments are excellent starts. Please feel free to keep posting or email me (within iNat, or johnmartin2002@gmail.com or john.martin@naturevancouver.ca). I will be reviewing every idea.
For now, I am in the process of having a joint blog session hosted by CWF with the city of Montreal lead and hopefully there will be some good insights shared between us. In the near future, I intend to contact the lead in Victoria as well since our organizations are both part of the broader BC Nature society here in BC and we have talked (emailed) over the past few months.

That said, growth is the key goal for 2025.
Strategies for growth hopefully will become clearer as we review what happened as both of you have already started to reflect on.

At this time my simplistic planning assumptions are:
1) We need to grow our own internal engagement at Nature Vancouver.
2) How to grow the number of observers throughout the MVRD is something we should focus on. While we have a large base of people and organizations, we also have a high degree of organizational separation across many organizations. i.e. we are not a unified set of stakeholders.
3) How to eliminate the lack of iNaturalist knowledge in many new observers. Existing iNat users have no issue but I noted hesitation when we directed the use of iNat to those who had not used it before or preferred to use other platforms like eBird if birding was what they liked to do.
4) Assess how we can motivate broader corporate and political support.
5) How to increase the average number of observations and species for observers.

This is only a first cut and will evolve but you have to start somewhere or we will be approaching April 2025 before we actually act.

Thank you both and lets keep this discussion going.