Final days of the Amazing City Challenge 2024 Race

John,  glad to hear CNC Metro Van has done so well - congratulations and thanks for your leadership!

Sadly I have to report that the False Creek contingent failed to materialize.  It may have been the weather, but of course - there is no way of getting around that.  I have learned that I should not have counted on trying to build a cohort of iNatters through social media. Instead - I think it makes sense to encourage people who are participating in all of our volunteer activities to get an iNat account and start to use it. This approach would incentivize people to focus on their favorite neighborhoods, so that places like False Creek might build a cohort that can be marshalled as CNC approaches.

John, is there a way to begin to identify & recruit iNatters on the basis of the location of their affinity to a particular location? I'd appreciate learning if that is possible - that would allow us to create a kind of "club" over the entire year so that when CNC comes around we'd actually have a plan - including a recruitment plan. I had followed your suggestion and contacted the top 100+ contributors in the False Creek area, but I discovered that many of the most prolific were not Vancouver residents!

Zaida

Hi all,

@northvandad @zaide Thanks so much for the organization efforts this year.

If I could chip in a couple of thoughts with this discussion both from being a routine iNaturalist user and from having casually looked into the science of these platforms.

1) It does seem iNatters who are prolific observers are the rare users of the app. Most people try the app and then never really try it again after a few dozen to a hundred observations. Some scientists have identified this as the key challenge - i.e., maintaining long-term engagement.

If you dig into the numbers of this year's CNC projects, you can notice this theme for CNC Vancouver - about half the observations were made by 6 people. But if you look at Montreal's CNC project, the distribution is a lot broader - they had more than twice the people making observations with nobody really being a 'prolific' observer when compared to the handful in Vancouver. Montreal definitely had the 'power in numbers' game working in their favour. I'd be curious to know what strategy Montreal used to promote their CNC strategy or if they're generally a much more outdoors/nature photographying city?

2) I do think social media is needed to effectively capture the attention of many people. However - this does take some effort; time (weeks in advance) and cross-platform promotion (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram...). Some of the standard social networking strategies is to get certain local groups with many followers to broadcast it to their audience; but I'm not savvy with this as others so others may know who specifically could help that's specific to the MVRD.
 
3) In general - if you look back at the annual Canadian CNC projects over time since 2020, the total participation has slowly grown each year. It'll likely take a couple tries to find the formula that gets some CNC Canada city projects placing in the top 10 'global' rankings if that's a long-term goal. The Pacific northwest is one of the biodiverse and nature-centric parts of North America, so it's likely more a matter of user engagement.

4) For the False Creek area - this did pique my interest, but it was scheduled during my normal work hours. At least for me, I would have planned to come out if it was scheduled in advance for the Saturday or Sunday.

Sad to say I'll be moving to another province soon - wish you all good luck with CNC 2025!

I'm also very interested in how we can get more people invested in iNaturalist, so I'll be curious to hear others' thoughts on what we can learn from other cities for future CNCs (it sounds like John has seen it, but there's a very interesting post in the forums in the Nature Talk section on how La Paz has gotten so much engagement!). Seeing the differences between large Canadian cities was quite interesting, and I was very entertained that Vancouver and Montréal have been so close in observation count; two Canadian cities on a giant global list, and somehow we spent most of the time right next to each other!

I've been informally telling my friends about iNat as I've become more invested in the platform over the past few years, but lately I've been thinking that I'd like to do more formal or organized outreach to help folks understand what iNaturalist is and the avenues it provides for learning about and connecting with one's environment. I have some professional connections with at least one biodiversity-and-conservation related organization in the city, so I've reached out to them to see if I can give a presentation to staff and volunteers about iNaturalist. I'm also thinking of posting more regularly about it on social media, though I'm not much of an influencer! I'd be curious to hear more about any other efforts underway in the metro area too. I know a lot of schools and universities get their students to use iNaturalist; I wonder if they could benefit from working with experienced users to introduce it to those groups.

I too was interested in the False Creek event, but in the end it occurred a bit too close to a professional obligation that I couldn't skip. I was still able to visit some of the area later that day (and saw my first warbler of the year!), though it would have been nice to meet other enthusiasts and learn more from experts on the local environment.

And Jackson: I wish you the best of luck and plenty of nature time wherever you're headed! It's always been nice to see your activity in the region, and I really admire the diversity and expertise of your contributions here.