Diario del proyecto City Nature Challenge 2020: New York City

While we wait for the results of the City Nature Challenge to be announced on Monday evening, I found a couple of other ongoing projects that you can check out!

Sea Grant is conducting a Great Lakes BioBlitz right now! All states that border the Great Lakes are involved and there are some educator resources connected to it. Here is New York's project page, which is administered by @chickadee09. It started April 22 and goes through May 20. Since that time included the CNC, you'll see some familiar faces in the leaderboards right now :-)

The other project happening now is the May EcoQuest for the NYC EcoFlora Project . This month is all about posting your old photos to iNaturalist. Click here for more info. This project is administered by @danielatha.

I love the idea of posting old photos. During these stay-at-home times, I've been working on that for my own pre-smartphone photos during the Citizen/Community Science Virtual Happy Hours I've been hosting (the next one is May 13, RSVP at this Eventbrite link). There's a great interview that iNaturalist posted about posting old photos on the iNaturalist blog here: https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/17268-an-interview-with-gcwarbler

ETA: @srall let me know about the Socially Distant BioBlitz which happens every 3 weeks. The next one is tomorrow (May 3). Check it out here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/socially-distant-bioblitz-5-3-2020

Stay tuned for CNC global results on Monday!

The results are in for 2020! Thank you to everyone who participated in the City Nature Challenge around the world!

Recall that in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the organizers of the 2020 City Nature Challenge decided to remove the competitive aspect of the Challenge and focus instead on working together for one global result. Over 41,000 people in 244 cities across the globe spent a weekend alone, but working together, to celebrate urban nature. Together, we made 815,258 observations of over 32,600 species. We hope that you all found the time you spent observing relaxing and restorative. The global organizers at a California Academy of Sciences and the Natural History Museum of LA created an awesome infographic with these results and some other interesting finds. Check it out here: CNC 2020 Infographic PDF.

We didn’t think it would happen again this year, but it turns out that the week that included City Nature Challenge was once again the peak week of activity on iNaturalist! Check out the observation frequency graph here.

Since all NYC events were cancelled and we were under stay-at-home orders, we clearly could not reach the observation levels we have in the past. However, a few people were able to get out safely for some fresh air and observing during the Challenge and we actually almost doubled our observation total from 2017 (NYC’s first year participating) and found about 200 more species than we did in 2017. Visit this umbrella project to see how all the years compare – City Nature Challenge New York City.

The most observed species globally was the Common Dandelion, Taraxacum officinale. Here are the Top 20 Most Observed Species for New York City:

A few other interesting figures for NYC:

• Over the 4 days of the Challenge, we gained 76 new NYC iNaturalist observers - welcome to the community!
• We also potentially added 33 new to iNaturalist species reported for NYC. This number may change as more observations get identified.

Congrats to our top observers! I know you can see these names in the leaderboards, but I want to give them a shout out here, too:

Top Observers

Top Species Finders

Top Identifiers

We should also recognize the top observer and species finder in each borough. They are:
Brooklyn: @lisabrundage (obs) and @matthew_wills (spp)
Bronx: @irag (both)
Queens: @klodonnell (both)
Staten Island: @karen5lund (both)
Manhattan: @susanhewitt (both)

And for more borough comparisons, here are the top five species observed in each borough:

We had a double borough sighting of Bald Eagles this year during CNC! One in Flushing observed by @steven-cyclist (observation link) and one in Manhattan observed by @dawnvla (observation link). If you found anything you were particularly excited about, leave a link in the comments below!

Thank you to everyone who was able to celebrate urban nature with us!

Just wanted to send some reminders about projects/events/surveys you can participate in over the next few weeks!

You still have time - TWO MORE DAYS - to participate in Sea Grant's Great Lakes BioBlitz . All states that border the Great Lakes are involved and there are some educator resources connected to it. Here is New York's project page.

The next Socially Distant BioBlitz is this weekend - May 24. You have to join the project to participate. Check it out here.

Our next Community/Citizen Science Happy Hour is next week on Wednesday May 27. Sign up at our Eventbrite page. We work on online citizen science projects together for an hour. It's a good time!

If you want to help with a study about NYC Parks during the pandemic and you live in NYC, you can fill out this survey.