The City Nature Challenge is Back! Your Mission: Find and photograph Where the Wild Things Are in our area
by Susie Hairston
Do you want to do something to help the health of our local area, our planet, and us and have fun at the same time? The City Nature Challenge, (CNC) April 24 – 27th is it! The CNC is a global community science event that gets people outdoors to photograph local wildlife and contribute to a worldwide effort to better understand biodiversity. It generates valuable community science data on biodiversity that supports conservation, planning, and environmental decision-making.
All you need to do to help scientists learn more about the biodiversity in our area is to spend a few hours or even a few minutes here and there throughout the weekend taking photos of the wild things in our region — plants, animals and fungi you see around town — that “weed” growing in a crack in the sidewalk, the dragonfly or bird that just landed on a branch in front of you, the huge mushroom that suddenly sprouted up in your neighbor’s otherwise tame yard. Knowledge is power, and you can provide it while learning about the wild world all around you and having fun.
How to Participate:
Download the iNaturalist app on your phone, sign-up for an account, and familiarize yourself with using it. Go outside and snap a few pictures to practice taking and uploading before the challenge happens. You do not need any expertise, just the ability to discriminate between what is wild and what is not. Hint: most things in your yard like trees and the flowers and shrubs in your garden beds are not wild, but that mushroom in your neighbor’s yard, the insects, lizards, squirrels and birds that you see when you are walking around the neighborhood, and the occasional “weed” that pops up are all wild things and can be photographed and uploaded for the challenge. All photos taken in the Houston-Galveston region and uploaded to iNaturalist will be automatically added to our region’s project.
Some local organizations are hosting guided walks, etc during the challenge. If you feel like participating with a group rather than on your own, check out the CEC calendar for City Nature Challenge events.
Another way to participate in addition to/instead of taking and uploading photos is to help ID all the photos that have been taken afterwards from April 28th – May 10th. If you have expertise in native plants or are an entomologist, or an avid bird watcher, we need you to get on the iNaturalist app and start going through the observations that have been uploaded from April 24 -27th.
What to photograph?
Anything wild: all animals (birds, insects, squirrels, raccoons, etc) except domesticated pets and farm and zoo animals; fungi; and plants that have sprouted up by themselves (have not been planted by humans).
What not to photograph:*
Anything cultivated. Most of what is in our yards has been planted by us or someone else before us, so images of those things do not count for the CNC. But, if, for example, your oak tree had a lot of acorns this year and some of them sprouted and are growing in your yard right now, those are considered wild and eligible to be used. Any “weeds” in your yard are also eligible — and if you look closely, you will see there are quite a lot of different kinds of “weeds.”
Who should participate?
Everybody! You don’t have to be an expert. Just find a dragonfly resting on a leaf, or a doodle bug crawling across a pathway, or a red bellied woodpecker pecking for insects on a tree branch, or a dandelion pushing up in a crack in the sidewalk, and take a picture of it. Unless it is something really unusual, the app will immediately identify it for you. if it is something that can’t be immediately ID’d as a specific species, you can still upload it. Later, during the IDing period from April 28 – May 10th, experts will go through and check all the uploads for identification accuracy and help identify things that have not been properly identified.
If you live outside the city in a less developed area, you have more around you to photograph, but city dwellers, if you look carefully, you will see that we have a lot of wild left too.
If you have kids, this is a fun thing to do with them that helps them learn about and enjoy nature.
Photographing tips:
Focus on one organism at a time and try to get as close and clear a picture as possible.
Origins of the City Nature Challenge:
The CNC was started by The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the California Academy of Science in 2016 as a fun way to celebrate the first Citizen Science Day. That first CNC only included San Francisco and LA, but what started as a friendly competition between those two cities in 2016 has morphed into a global event with people from all over the world collaborating to help us all better understand the wildlife we share our planet with.
Click here for a quick video overview of the City Nature Challenge.
Click here for more information on the City Nature Challenge.
Click on these resources to learn more about using the iNaturalist app and how to take good photos for the project etc:
iNaturalist Tutorial videos: https://inaturalist.freshdesk.
Tips on how to take great photos for iNaturalist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?