City Nature Challenge 2019: Sacramento Region's Boletim

The big City Nature Challenge weekend is over, and now we can take a breather, whew. JUST KIDDING. There is still tons of work to be done to help the Sacramento Region win before the results are announced on May 6!

If you have any photos you haven’t uploaded, be sure the “Date Observed” is April 26-29, and you upload it before May 5. You can also help by going through the observations that we collected and identify them. We need at least 2 people to confirm the species for an observation to become Research Grade. With over 9,000 observations Sacramento collected, we can really use your help identifying all of those for science.

Get going and big thanks to users @hailey_adler, @paloma, @justin2, @cjadallah, and @lglevanik for being the top 5 identifiers so far!

The dust has finally settled, and the final CNC global numbers are in. With 2019 being the first year the Sacramento Region has participated in the Challenge, us co-organizers had no idea what to expect. With a budget of zero dollars, and volunteering our time to spreading the word, we half expected it would only be us adding observations throughout the weekend. But BOY were we wrong, Sacramento! You all STEPPED UP and blew our 8,000 observation goal out of the water!

We are so proud of our community answering to the call for observations for our city. The real winner, of course, is science for the almost 1,000,000 observations from 159 cities the world added in just 4 days, and nature for the over 35,000 users who went outside and looked around. Over 31,000 species were documented, including more than 1,100 rare, endangered, or threatened species. Check out the City Nature Challenge website for more info graphics.

Here are some fun stats to celebrate from the Sacramento Region:

• Overall, Sacramento came in 30th out of 159 participating cities
• Of 27 the other participating cities with a population of 2,500,000-5,000,000, Sacramento came in 9th
• In all of 2019 leading up to the Challenge, post-Challenge our region was able to increase the number of observations by 7.8% (9832 observations), species by 2% (124 species), and observers by 3.5% (233 observers).
• Sacramento came in 5th for the number of total observers for a region > 20,000 km2
• Sacramento had an average of 18 observations per person
• For all the observations we collected in the Sacramento region, 57% ID’d to species became research grade (or useable for scientific quality data).

We've learned a lot, so we have plenty of ideas and we can't wait to be back again next year. Special thanks to our top contributors for 2019:
@norasaurus @vermfly @lglevanik @simpylmare55 @phylogenomics @lindagal2 @haileyadler @sarahangulo @lacigerhart @paloma @julie253 @justin2 @cjadallah @bonnie_beth

And thank you to ALL who participated in ANY way, your contributions matter for science and nature. See ya in 2020!