City Nature Challenge 2019: Christchurch's Boletim

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.

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!