City Nature Challenge: Background & First Australian Cities
The City Nature Challenge has been running since 2016 when it was started as a competition between Los Angeles and San Francisco to record urban biodiversity using the iNaturalist platform. During a 7-day period, over 20,000 observations were made of 2500 species by over 1,000 participants. In 2017 the number of cities involved grew to 16, in 2018 it grew to 68 cities from various countries. In 2019 there were 159 participating cities where over 35,000 people uploaded just shy of 1 million observations over a 4 day period.
Although Australia has the 4th highest number of observations on iNaturalist, it has yet to have a city participate in the Challenge. To become a participating city requires a significant investment of time and effort, with organizers beginning preparations from as early as September the previous year. Thankfully this year several groups have stepped up.
This year, 4 Australian cities are participating in the challenge and have prepared associated iNat projects:
City Nature Challenge 2020: Sydney (NSW)
City Nature Challenge 2020: Geelong (VIC)
City Nature Challenge 2020: Redlands City (QLD)
City Nature Challenge 2020: Greater Adelaide (SA)
The challenge will run for 4 days from Friday April 24th through to Monday April 27th inclusive. Any observation taken during this time that is recorded within the area of a City Nature Challenge project will be included in the challenge results. Following this, from April 28th through to May 3rd is the identification period. This time is provided to allow participants to identify as many species as possible from the 4 day challenge period. The challenge is to see which cities can make the most observations, record the most species and engage the most people.
Of course, for South Australian residents, the City Nature Challenge 2020: Greater Adelaide is the project to join. This has been organised by Philip Roetman (@philip-roetman) and Stephen Fricker (@stephen169). The area included (following local government area boundaries) extends from the Murray River mouth, across Lake Alexandrina, up the river, around Murray Bridge, across toward Mount Torrens, up past Kapunda, across to the north of Thompson Beach and along the coast back to the Murray River mouth.
April has been the challenge month since the City Nature Challenge began as this coincides with the Northern Hemisphere Spring. Unfortunately for us this means the challenge will occur in Autumn and we will miss out of recording the tremendous emergence of life in our Spring. However this shouldn't dissuade us, as in 2019 Cape Town, South Africa recorded both the most observations and most species in the challenge, beating out many cities experiencing Springtime.
As the event date gets closer I'll post a general guide on how contribute to the City Nature Challenge 2020: Greater Adelaide project, with some finer details on the challenge. In the meantime, sign up to the Greater Adelaide project and follow the Facebook page. Also sign up to the associated City Nature Challenge 2020: Australia umbrella project.
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Looking forward to Adelaide's first CNC and seeing you all following the project.
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