The City Nature Challenge is an annual, global, community science competition to document

urban Urban means "related to a city". In that sense, the term may refer to: * Urban area, geographical area distinct from rural areas * Urban culture, the culture of towns and cities Urban may also refer to: General * Urban (name), a list of people ...

biodiversity Biodiversity or biological diversity is the variety and variability of life on Earth. Biodiversity is a measure of variation at the genetic (''genetic variability''), species (''species diversity''), and ecosystem (''ecosystem diversity'') l ...

. The challenge is a

bioblitz A BioBlitz, also written without capitals as bioblitz, is an intense period of biological surveying in an attempt to record all the living species within a designated area. Groups of scientists, naturalists and volunteers conduct an intensive fi ...

that engages residents and visitors to find and document plants, animals, and other organisms living in urban areas. The goals are to engage the public in the collection of biodiversity data, with three awards each year for the cities that make the most observations, find the most species, and engage the most people. Participants primarily use the

iNaturalist iNaturalist is a social network of naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe. iNaturalist may be accessed via its website or from its mobile applic ...

app and website to document their observations, though some areas use other platforms, such as Natusfera in Spain. The observation period is followed by several days of identification and the final announcement of winners. Participants need not know how to identify the species; help is provided through iNaturalist's

automated species identification Automated species identification is a method of making the expertise of Taxonomy (biology), taxonomists available to ecologists, parataxonomy, parataxonomists and others via digital technology and artificial intelligence. Today, most automated ide ...

feature as well as the community of users on iNaturalist, including professional scientists and expert naturalists.

History

The City Nature Challenge was founded by Alison Young and Rebecca Johnson of the

California Academy of Sciences The California Academy of Sciences is a research institute and natural history museum in San Francisco, California, that is among the largest museums of natural history in the world, housing over 46 million specimens. The Academy began in 1853 ...

and Lila Higgins of the

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is the largest natural and historical museum in the western United States. Its collections include nearly 35 million specimens and artifacts and cover 4.5 billion years of history. This large coll ...

. The first challenge was in the spring of 2016 between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Participants documented over 20,000 observations with the

platform. In 2017, the challenge expanded to 16 cities across the United States and participants collected over 125,000 observations of wildlife in 5 days. In 2018, the challenge expanded to 68 cities across the world. In four days, over 441,000 observations of more than 18,000 species were observed, and over 17,000 people participated. The 2019 challenge more than doubled in scale, with almost a million observations of over 31,000 species observed by around 35,000 people. Taking the competition beyond its US roots, the 2019 event was a much more international affair, with the winning city for observations and species coming from Africa (

Cape Town Cape Town ( af, Kaapstad; , xh, iKapa) is one of South Africa's three capital cities, serving as the seat of the Parliament of South Africa. It is the legislative capital of the country, the oldest city in the country, and the second largest ...

), and three South American (

La Paz La Paz (), officially known as Nuestra Señora de La Paz (Spanish pronunciation: ), is the seat of government of the Bolivia, Plurinational State of Bolivia. With an estimated 816,044 residents as of 2020, La Paz is the List of Bolivian cities ...

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and

Quito Quito (; qu, Kitu), formally San Francisco de Quito, is the capital and largest city of Ecuador, with an estimated population of 2.8 million in its urban area. It is also the capital of the province of Pichincha. Quito is located in a valley o ...

) and two Asian areas (

Hong Kong Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ( abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delt ...

and

Klang Valley Klang Valley ( ms, Lembah Klang; zh, 巴生谷; ) is an urban conglomeration in Malaysia that is centered in the federal territories of Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya, and includes its adjoining cities and towns in the state of Selangor. It is con ...

) ranking in the top ten for number of observations. In 2020, the organizers removed the competition aspect due to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

, stating, "To ensure the safety and health of all participants, this year’s CNC is no longer a competition. Instead, we want to embrace the collaborative aspect of sharing observations online with a digital community, and celebrate the healing power of nature as people document their local biodiversity to the best of their ability." Fewer observations were documented in 2020 than the prior year, though more species were found, and more cities and people participated. 2021 and 2022 each saw successive records in every category, but as in 2020, no winning cities were announced due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Results

Notes

References

External links

* {{Official website, citynaturechallenge.org Citizen science Biological censuses Biodiversity