City Nature Challenge 2019: Christchurch's Boletim

Hi, everyone-

In case you're interested in another hunt, ECan are asking for help finding Chilean mayten trees. They look like this:

(Full observation here)

Here's ECan's full message:
Environment Canterbury Biosecurity are seeking sightings of 'Organism of Interest' Chilean mayten in Canterbury
To join the hunt and be in to win!
Sign up to iNaturalist and join the Chilean mayten Hunt project here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/canterbury-chilean-mayten-huntl

As a way of saying thanks for helping us to form a picture of where Chilean mayten is in Canterbury, we have up to $500-worth of spot prize giveaways!
In addition, the Environment Canterbury Biosecurity 'Eagle eye' Shield will be awarded to the individual with the most confirmed Chilean mayten sightings in Canterbury during August, September and October 2019.
Every confirmed Chilean mayten sighting recorded on iNaturalist (with good photos and location) and located in the Canterbury region is one entry into the spot prize draw. A NEW confirmed Chilean mayten location within Canterbury is worth 3 entries!
Spot prizes include petrol vouchers and Weedbuster merchandise.
Details:
• The draw will occur on Wednesday 6 November
• There is no restriction on who can enter.
• A “new” sighting is defined as one not currently recorded on iNaturalist in Canterbury New Zealand by anyone else.
• Should a tie occur then new records will have a higher rating.
• The judge’s decision is final.

Good luck and get spotting!

Our amazing final tallies for the City Nature Challenge were: 17549 observations, 2377 species, 312 participants! A short while ago we received a spreadsheet from the central organisers summarising the results. We'll dig into these in more detail as soon as we can (there are so many different ways to look at the data!), but in the meantime, here are some highlights:

Overall, out of 159 cities that participated worldwide, Christchurch was:
16th for number of observations
13th for number of species
40th for number of participants

By population:
For cities between with populations between 250,000 and 500,000, we came in 2nd place for numbers of observations, species and participants, after Mazatlan, Mexico.

Area:
For cities with an area between 1000-2500km2, we came in:
2nd for observations (after Quito, Peru)
1st for species
5th for participants

Region:
In the East Asia/Pacific region, we came in 3rd for all categories after Hong Kong and Klang Valley (Kuala Lumpur).

The global totals were an astonishing 963,773 observations of 31,000+ species, from 35,126 people. Over 7500 people helped make identifications as well. Among the participants, our project was boosted by local user Jon Sullivan, who came in 2nd worldwide for number of observations! We also had at least three kiwis ID'ing species for our local project that made the global top 100 for number of identifications: Lloyd Esler, Mark Tutty and Mark Smale, each of whom contributed to more than 1800 identifications!

Congratulations, everyone! An awesome result for an awesome effort!

As of 9AM, the City Nature Challenge is officially over for Christchurch - now we just need to wait 22 hours for the rest of the world to catch up! The final global results will be announced tomorrow afternoon our time.

The final tallies on our project page are amazing!
17549 observations
2377 species
312 observers
336 identifiers

Of our observations, 49% reached "research grade" in time, meaning they had been identified to species level with agreement from at least two different users. Another 29% are listed as "needs ID," which applies to observations that have photos or sounds, but for which the species level hasn't been agreed on by multiple users. This is often the case for species which are very difficult to identify without having a very close look at a specimen, for example. The final category, "casual," applies to 22% of our observations. Casual observations are those that either don't include evidence (for example, you saw a bird but couldn't get a photo of it before it flew away), or that are tagged as captive/cultivated.

In case you were wondering, our species count will include both observations identified to the species level, and a tally of "branch tips" for genera, families etc.

It's been an epic effort over the last 10 days to collect, upload and identify all of these observations. Thank you so much everyone for your hard work! We'll be in touch again tomorrow with a summary of global results, as well as some of the Christchurch-specific highlights.

The clock’s struck 12, and our 96-hour mad dash to find, record and photograph as much nature as we can in Christchurch is over. What a last day it was, too, with a wild afternoon of gale-force southerly gusts, biting rain, flooded streets and power outages! Whether you were braving the weather to get a last few observations on the board, or huddled inside uploading photos you took earlier in the Challenge, you kept our tally growing. As of midnight at the close of the challenge we are at 11198 observations of 1904 species from 303 people. (At midnight last night we were on 9280 observations, 1411 species and 206 people.)

We topped 10,000 observations at 1:45PM with an observation of a little Ichneumonid wasp submitted by @zo33. Another exciting addition to our list today was a Hector’s dolphin, spotted by a kayaker on Saturday and uploaded this evening.

Many users still have a backlog of observations to post, and the user community will be working hard over the next week to identify everything that has (and is still to be posted) - remember we have until 9AM on May 6th to get everything finished. So our tally is sure to continue growing over the next week. We’ll post more updates here (just less frequently) and on iNaturalist.nz's facebook and twitter feeds. The final results will come out late on May 7th, a few hours after the final global participating city (Maui, Hawaii) wraps up their upload and ID period.

A HUGE thank you to everyone who has participated over the last four days either here in Christchurch or virtually through the website. It’s been hard work, but a lot of fun! We hope the event has boosted your interest in the wild things that live alongside us, in all the nooks and crannies of Christchurch City and Banks Peninsula.

It's 1PM, the weather's turning, and we only have about 5 hours of daylight left - but we're approaching 10,000 observations and our species count has topped 1600. Unless you're trapped in an office, make the most of these last few hours! Go, Christchurch!

One more day to go! At the end of day three, we’re on 9280 observations of 1411 species from 206 people. (At midnight last night we were on 5409 observations, 1087 species and 155 people.)

Of the observers, 73 are new users who signed on to iNaturalist.nz for the first time during the City Nature Challenge! Welcome to the community, and thanks for jumping in with both feet! Because it’s such a busy time, we haven’t had a chance to greet you properly, but over the next week you’ll be seeing other users interacting with your observations to comment and help with ID’s.

Everyone, please remember that your observations need to be made by 11:59PM on Monday night, but you don’t need to have them uploaded and identified until 9AM on May 6th. So if you have a bunch of photos sitting on your camera, don’t worry about getting them onto the website before the end of the day. You can go out and take more photos instead! ; )

If you do have photos or sounds to upload, though, please do try to get them onto the website as soon as it’s convenient, especially if you’re someone like me who will need a lot of help with IDs. The earlier photos are up, the more time the iNaturalist.nz community will have to suggest and confirm identifications.

We’ve hit the halfway mark for the City Nature Challenge! Some of the top cities globally are pulling in amazing numbers of observations, but we are still doing fantastic - especially considering how small a city we are! We kept up the pace today, and are now on 5409 observations of 1087 species from 155 people. (At midnight last night were were on 2557 observations, 709 species and 95 people.)

About 120 of the cities who signed up have at least a few observations on the board now, and as of midnight we’re sitting at 10th place for observations (right behind Los Angeles!), 7th place for species, and 21st for number of participants. (We have fewer observers, but obviously our observers are super hard-working and efficient!) You can check out the leaderboard at the City Nature Challenge website.

Keen to give us an extra boost? Pull a friend into the competition! We still have two days to go, so there’s plenty of time for new participants to make their mark.

Since you’ve all been working so hard, we’d like to invite you to a participant get-together tonight (Sunday, 27 April). We’ll get some pizzas and fizzy drinks and enjoy some downtime with fellow city nature-finders.

Where: WEA - 59 Gloucester Street
When: 5:30 PM

Please leave a comment by 2PM if you will be coming, so we know how much pizza and fizzy/juice to get (sorry, no alcohol at the WEA). Please also let me know if you would prefer veggie pizza. (You can go to https://inaturalist.nz/projects/city-nature-challenge-2019-christchurch/journal to leave a comment if you’re seeing this in an email. If you’re also a trip leader who has received a direct email from Laura, you only need to respond one way or the other.)

Fantastic work everyone!

We have built a variety of comparison tables in iNaturalist.nz that can help us work out what species we haven’t ticked off the "to find" list. What the comparison tables show is a column for observation of every species ever found in the Christchurch District area that we’re using for the Challenge, and a column showing the tally for those species during the City Nature Challenge. These lists are dynamic and should update as we add new observations - but you may need to refresh them every now and then to keep them current.

Because the lists are limited to 500 taxa each, I’ve had to divide some of the big taxonomic groups up. This was most problematic for the dicots. Unfortunately, I had to split these across a few very random lists…. But hopefully this will still be useful!

Fungi and Lichens EXCEPT Agaricomycetes
Agaricomycetes

Birds
Amphibians and Reptiles
Mammals
Coleoptera
Crustaceans, Myriapods and Entognathans
Lepidoptera
Chelicerates
Other - includes Fish, Molluscs, Slime Moulds

Non-vascular plants
Non-angiosperm vascular plants
Monocots

Dicots - list 1
Dicots - list 2
Dicots - list 3
Dicots - Asterales only

And here are some of the things that have not apparently been reported yet - although I’m well aware that many people have observations that won’t be uploaded until after the event. (And the "compare" tool is sort of experimental so we can’t be 100% certain it’s working exactly right.)

-NZ ice plant
-Boneseed (!!!!)
-European Spindle Tree
-Harrier
-Greenfinch
-White-banded house jumping spider
-2-spotted ladybird
-hare
-stoat
-NZ looper
-Boulder copper

…that’s a tiny sample, of course, but the take-home message is: don’t ignore the common stuff and/or the exotics! It all counts!

We're 23 hours into the City Nature Challenge, and it's been a great first day! Aside from one very brief early morning surge from Hong Kong, we've been at the top of the leaderboard all day, maintaining a steady lead. However, dawn is breaking on the east coast of the Americas, so we'll need to get back to work tomorrow!

As of about 11:00PM, we've tallied 2494 observations of 702 species from 93 observers, with identifications being provided by 87 iNaturalist.nz users - including some fantastic folks from out of town who are putting in a lot of work to help with the surge.

The three closest cities are:
Hong Kong: 1993 observations, 597 species, 165 observers - 4 hours behind us
Klang Valley (Kuala Lumpur): 1621 observations, 407 species, 121 observers - 4 hours behind us
Cape Town: 1576 observations, 373 species, 182 observers - 10 hours behind us

Hong Kong and Klang Valley (both with populations of over 7 million people!) were towards the top of the final leaderboard last year, with 20,000+ observations and around 700 observers each! So go us for keeping ahead of them on day 1!

In fact, our one-day tally would place us about midway up the final results board for last year's Challenge. And that's without all of the observations that folks made today that will be getting uploaded over the next 10 days.

This is so exciting! 😃

Keep up the awesome work, everyone, and spread the word. We have some real momentum going!

The Global City Nature Challenge is on! We started off with just a few observations at midnight, but now the sun is up, the weather's lovely, and it's time to get out there and spot as much as we can!

If, like me, you're an observer who needs help with identifications: please don't fret if your photos don't get identified quickly during the event. Several of the local experts who are top identifiers on iNaturalist.nz will be rushing around making observations for the next four days so may be pressed for time! The good news is that we have a full week after the event to get everything identified, so we will have time to catch up on IDs then.

A couple of key tips to help with identification are to take a few different photos (for example, showing the overall size and shape of a plant, plus closeups of leaves, flowers, berries), and to add a very general label for your observation. Even labelling your observation at a broad level - as a Plant, for example - is helpful.