The City Nature Challenge is an annual, global, community science competition to document

urban Urban means "related to a city". In that sense, the term may refer to: * Urban area, geographical area distinct from rural areas * Urban culture, the culture of towns and cities Urban may also refer to: General * Urban (name), a list of people ...

biodiversity Biodiversity is the variability of life, life on Earth. It can be measured on various levels. There is for example genetic variability, species diversity, ecosystem diversity and Phylogenetics, phylogenetic diversity. Diversity is not distribut ...

. The challenge is a

bioblitz A BioBlitz, also written without capitals as bioblitz, is an intense period of biological surveying in an attempt to record all the living species within a designated area. Groups of scientists, naturalists, and volunteers conduct an intensive ...

that engages residents and visitors to find and document plants, animals, and other organisms living in urban areas. The goals are to engage the public in the collection of biodiversity data, with three awards each year for the cities that make the most observations, find the most species, and engage the most people. Participants primarily use the

iNaturalist iNaturalist is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit social network of naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe. iNaturalist may be accessed via its web ...

app and website to document their observations. The observation period is followed by several days of identification and the final announcement of winners. Participants need not know how to identify the species; help is provided through iNaturalist's

automated species identification Automated species identification is a method of making the expertise of taxonomists available to ecologists, parataxonomists and others via digital technology and artificial intelligence. Today, most automated identification systems rely on imag ...

feature as well as the community of users on iNaturalist, including professional scientists and expert naturalists.

History

The City Nature Challenge was founded by Alison Young and Rebecca Johnson of the

California Academy of Sciences The California Academy of Sciences is a research institute and natural history museum in San Francisco, San Francisco, California, that is among the largest List of natural history museums, museums of natural history in the world, housing over ...

and Lila Higgins of the

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County Nature is an inherent character or constitution, particularly of the ecosphere or the universe as a whole. In this general sense nature refers to the laws, elements and phenomena of the physical world, including life. Although humans are par ...

. The first event took place in 2016, in which

Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

competed against

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

and won in all three categories (most observations, most species, most participants). In 2017 the challenge expanded to 16 cities across the United States, with a different city winning in each category. In 2018 it expanded to 68 cities across the world, but US participation still dominated and San Francisco won in all categories. The 2019 challenge was more than doubled in scale and took the competition beyond its US roots, with

Cape Town Cape Town is the legislature, legislative capital city, capital of South Africa. It is the country's oldest city and the seat of the Parliament of South Africa. Cape Town is the country's List of municipalities in South Africa, second-largest ...

, winning two of the three categories. In 2020, the organizers removed the competition aspect due to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

, stating, "To ensure the safety and health of all participants, this year’s CNC is no longer a competition. Instead, we want to embrace the collaborative aspect of sharing observations online with a digital community, and celebrate the healing power of nature as people document their local biodiversity to the best of their ability." This change remained in effect for following years.

Results

Reference:

References

External links

* {{Official website, citynaturechallenge.org Citizen science Biological censuses Biodiversity