City Nature Challenge 2020: The Wasatch's Boletim

We are just 13 days away from the start of the 2021 City Nature Challenge! CNC: The Wasatch needs your help again this year to record as much nature as we can in Northern Utah from April 30-May 3, maybe even toping last year's record-breaking 6,686 observations. Can we do it?! Not without you! To join the fun, all you need to do is:

-take photos of the wild living things (or evidence of the wild living things) you find in Box Elder, Cache, Davis, Salt Lake, Summit, Wasatch, Weber and Utah counties from April 30-May 3
-Add them to iNaturalist, and they will automatically count towards CNC: The Wasatch
-Get the word out to your friends and family!
-Join the 2021 City Nature Challenge: The Wasatch project for updates.

Looking for a local event, ways to connect, or fun resources for educators, families, or anyone interested in this year's City Nature Challenge? Visit The Natural History Museum of Utah's CNC webpage for more info: https://nhmu.utah.edu/citizen-science/challenge

We're making this year's challenge a friendly competition between participating Utah counties (Box Elder, Cache, Davis, Salt Lake, Summit, Wasatch, Weber and Utah). Who can find the most nature? With your help, it could be your county!

Thanks to the 2021 City Nature Challenge: The Wasatch partner organizations making this year possible: Natural History Museum of Utah, Hutchings Museum, Jordan River Commission, Ogden Nature Center, Red Butte Garden, Salt Lake City Library, Salt Lake County Library, Stokes Nature Center, Swaner Preserve and EcoCenter, Thanksgiving Point, The Nature Conservancy in Utah, Tracy Aviary, TreeUtah, US Department of Agriculture, US Fish & Wildlife Service, Utah’s Hogle Zoo, Utah Society for Environmental Education, Utah Open Lands, Utah Valley University.

We're looking for spiders in Utah! Help us photograph any spider you see through August 8th, in celebration of Antelope Island State Park's 8th annual Spider Fest. There are over 600 species of spiders living in the state of Utah, how many can we find this week? View the 2020 Spider Fest iNaturalist project page to follow along with what's been found already, and see our guide to making ideal spider observations on iNaturalist.

Join the 2020 Spider Fest fun on Antelope Island State Park's event page.

Interested to keep the spider conversation going? Join The Natural History Museum of Utah and iNaturalist Curator @tigerbb (Rebecca Ray) for an interactive online conversation about Utah spiders this Saturday August 8, where you can learn more about Utah spiders, ask questions, and share stories. Anyone is welcome to join the fun! You will need to register to receive Zoom connection info for this free online event. or more information and to register, visit: https://forms.gle/AmkDQYb3sfEXRgXq5

NHMU is back with the first of our summer BioBlitz events! Join our June Trailside BioBlitz happening through June 28th, and follow the project for updates. This summer, we are collecting data along two well-known Utah trails: The Jordan River Parkway, and the Bonneville Shoreline. Help us record the biodiversity of these two corridors, while getting outside to enjoy the wonderful open spaces we have access to. We are shifting our summer data collection model to be as safe and respectful of physical distancing as possible, while still encouraging people to get outside, and help us collect biodiversity data. This year's Trailside BioBlitz events will still collect data to guide research and management of the open spaces for Salt Lake City's Trails and Natural Lands Division, we just won't be gathering together in person to BioBlitz - we will make observations our own, and connect via iNaturalist!

Any observation made along the Jordan River Parkway Trail or SLC-managed section of the Bonneville Shoreline Trail will automatically count towards the challenge.

We can't wait to see what you find!

Here are some other ways to stay involved:

Let us know what you find, or how you are getting out to bioblitz!
-Tag @NHMU in your social media posts and use #trailsidebioblitz to be entered to win passes to NHMU.

Help us spread the word!
-Share this bioblitz with your friends, family, neighbors and coworkers. BioBlitzing is a great way to get outside, relax, recharge and connect, all while learning a little more about nature all around you, and helping scientific research. It really is as easy as taking a photo!

Our next Trailside BioBlitz events will be:
July 25-August 2, 2020
August 22- 30, 2020

Learn more about NHMU's Trailside BioBlitz events on our website: https://nhmu.utah.edu/slcnn

TODAY is the final day to upload observations (photos, images, gifs, sounds) made April 24-27, and to make IDs on observations. We need your help to make IDs on the many amazing observations recorded last weekend. These are the observations that still need ID.

Identifications are a crucial step to an observation becoming a research quality record. The official worldwide results of the 2020 City Nature Challenge will be announced tomorrow, and will include all observations and ID from The Wasatch project as of the end of the day today.

If you come across any interesting observations during your ID, post them in the comments- We'd love to see 'em!

Thanks to all of you amazing folks out making observations this weekend, we blew past our 2019 observation record on the second day of the challenge, surpassed 6,000 observations, and are on our way to identifying more than 1,000 different species living with us here in Northern Utah. We've already had at least one report of one iNaturalist first record (a species never before documented on iNat) and other exciting finds are sure to emerge as we continue identifying your observations. If you know of any first records, interesting finds, or great observations (or made one yourself!), post it in the comments here! We would love to see it! THE CITY NATURE CHALLENGE ISN'T OVER YET! Our final collective results will be announced on May 4, but there is still work to do! HERE'S HOW YOU CAN HELP:

-Finish uploading your April 24-27 observations-
As long as your photos were TAKEN April 24-27, then you can upload them through May 3 and have them count for the City Nature Challenge. If you took photos on your phone, you can upload them through the app. If you made observations using a camera, you can upload using the iNaturalist Upload page on your home computer; here is a short video with more info: https://vimeo.com/167431843

-Help with Identifications-
In the same way that anyone can be an observer, anyone can also help identify observations. Identifications are a crucial step to an observation becoming a research quality record. To get started, select "Observations" on our project page and then choose “Identify.” From this page, you can add various filters to your search, to explore groups of species you know a little bit about. If you’re not an expert in any group, you can still help by identifying the “unknowns” - the observations with no IDs at all! To do this, click the “Filters” button and then select the dashed-line leaf with a question mark in it. This will show you all the observations that are currently listed as “unknown.” It’s really helpful to go through these and add high-level IDs like “plants” or “insects” or “birds” or “fungi” - whatever you know about the organism - so people who do know how to ID these groups down to species can find them! Here is a video about using the Identify page: https://vimeo.com/246153496

No matter what, please only add an ID of which you can be reasonably sure - it’s fine if you don’t know what something is, and it’s fine to only add a genus or family or even kingdom level ID.

If you are interested, you can also expand your identification skills beyond Utah - to help ID observations made during the CNC worldwide! Here is the Identify page for the entire City Nature Challenge.

Thank you for your amazing observations over the weekend, and if you are able/interested, for helping to make these 2020 CNC observations research-quality data points.

Don't forget to add any observations of note (e.g., first records, interesting photos, observations that were hard to get, etc.), or observations you have questions about, to the comments below- we would love to see what you found, and answer questions if you have them.

We are coming to the final hours of the 2020 City Nature Challenge! As a reminder, you have until May 3rd to upload your images and files, so no pressure to get images uploaded tonight. As long as they were taken/observed from April 24-27, 2020, (and are uploaded by May 3, 2020) they will count towards the challenge. What else will you find this evening? Here is some inspiration for those final posts:

-Record evening birdsong using the voice memo app on your phone, and then upload the song to iNaturalist as an audio file (note: you can only upload audio files from a computer, not from a mobile device, unfortunately). More on how to do this here

-Have you looked for things in and on your house yet? Spiders in the basement, Box Elder Bugs in the garage, bird and wasp nests outside your home- these are great things to add to iNaturalist (they are wild, living things!), especially as we are all staying home, and staying safe.

-Consider getting out for some nighttime observations! There are many insects (and other animals) active at night. Bring a flashlight (or even a black light) and some containers (clear jars, tupperware, etc.) and see if you can catch some nocturnal insects. The clear containers and lights will help you photograph species you find (or you can bring them inside to photograph, and then release them when you are done). A quick internet search for collecting insects at night will yield even more inspiration, for those interested.

Happy observing!

What a great start to this year's City Nature Challenge! People across Box Elder, Cache, Davis, Salt Lake, Summit, Utah, Wasatch, and Weber counties are rising to the challenge to observe the nature all around them! In the first 2 days of the challenge, we surpassed the number of species observed in Utah during the entire 2019 CNC, and are well on our way to setting a new record of observations made in Utah during any previous CNC!

There are many observation highlights so far, including labeled observations of 2,064 plants, 309 birds, 302 insects, 79 spiders, 74 mammals, 56 fungi & lichens, 32 gastropods, 17 reptiles, 2 amphibians, and 2 Bacteria. Here are a few highlights:

• The second ever European Firebug observed in Cache County by @michaelashcroft
• A Northern Leopard Frog (a vulnerable species in UT) in Cache County @jgjulander
• This Swainson’s Hawk in Salt Lake County by @maerhwyn
• A Mallard duck and her ducklings observed by @hmcentire
• This Fox Squirrel captured mid-air by @stevenmerkley
• Miroscopic bacteria, Genus Beggiatoa, found by @zookanthos

What will you observe next!?

Team Wasatch is doing an amazing job recording species! The spirit of the City Nature Challenge is collecting images of the WILD organisms all around us – like insects living between flowers someone planted, weeds in park strips and sidewalk cracks, and squirrels and birds perched on buildings, power lines, and feeders. Observations of wild living or dead organisms, or evidence of those organisms (like shells, tracks, scat, fur, feathers, etc.) are all great photos to upload. If you take a photo of something you know is not wild (like a plant you planted in your yard!), please help the iNaturalist community by marking it as captive/cultivated before uploading it.

Keep up the great observations! We are already breaking Utah City Nature Challenge records, and we aren't even half way through!

It's that time of year again, where for one long weekend in April, every day is your birthday: full of surprises and gifts. It's the City Nature Challenge! Woohoo!

Here at Stokes Nature Center in Cache Valley, we are celebrating by encouraging everyone to bioblitz their backyard or front walk. What better way to bring in spring than with finally knowing what the heck kind of spiky weed is interrupting your lawn, or jetting out of a sidewalk crack? I guarantee you'll never see it as a weed again once you get to know what it is and start to notice how it too changes with the seasons as our year progresses.

This year is especially unique, for some pretty obvious reasons, but also for some exciting scientific reasons. iNaturalist had its first ever observation of the invasive European Firebug in Cache Valley just last month, and where there is one, there are more. This year, we're really interested to find out how far these recent invasives have spread throughout our community. Stokes is asking people to get low to the ground, and find these box elder bug imposters so that we can help document their spread into more of Utah.

We're also interested in folks finding anything new or unfamiliar in our amazing Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest. Did you know that Logan Canyon has some species that are found nowhere else on earth? It's tiny nooks and microclimates along the cliff walls make each rock eddy its own Galapagos island of potential for new discoveries. If you are able after investigating your backyard, get out and adventure a little, and catalog some of Utah's amazing unique species which hide in plain sight. Perhaps new friends will find their way in front of your camera and inspire others with curiosity, too.

This most important thing though, is that you have fun. CNC is such a wonderful opportunity to remember that our world is still good, full of amazing life, and Utah is a great place to be. As people around the world all dedicate one long weekend in April to remember who their wild neighbors are and learn about them, choose to do your part and learn to see your home, too, with a deeper eye. You'll begin to see, like with that sidewalk weed, that you are an inescapable part of a beautiful and vibrant world that's all around you always.

From all of us at Stokes Nature Center and the City Nature Challenge, we wish everyone a very happy CNC! We are so very happy to be just one of many who are representing The Wasatch this year. Happy iNaturalisting, Utah!

Patrick Kelly (@patrickkelly907)
Director of Education
Stokes Nature Center

The City Nature Challenge has begun! Here are some resources to keep you inspired over the next 4 days!

• Exploring Nature in and Around Your Home: a guide to help you look for and even attract species to your home and yard for the City Nature Challenge! It’s going to be a warm weekend, so we definitely recommend trying out a moth light – it can be as simple as a white pillowcase or t-shirt with a flashlight shining on it!

• Natural History Museum of Utah Backyard Bingo:

• In and Around your Home
• The Jordan River
• The Foothills

• Backyard Bioblitz: Converting your family into a team of scientists!

• Backyard Birds: Meet some feathered friends you are likely to see in your neighborhood with this interactive post from our friends at the Tracy Aviary.

• Utah State Noxious Weed Guide: Don't ignore weeds! iNaturalist observations of weeds help the Salt Lake County Health Department track, and mitigate their spread.