How did a local nature-spotting challenge become a worldwide program?
Courtesy The North Carolina Arboretum
When Alison Young, co-director of the Center for Biodiversity and Community Science at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, got the email urging agencies like hers to do something to celebrate Citizen Science Day in the spring of 2016, she called Lila Higgins, her counterpart at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County with a friendly challenge. What if they teamed up to capitalize on the existing sports rivalry between their cities and held a nature competition?
Spanning eight days, the first City Nature Challenge threw down the gauntlet for local citizens to find different species of animals and plants, snap photos and share them via the iNaturalist app, all with the goal of learning more about urban biodiversity. Young and Higgins assumed the event would be a small, one-time thing. But when a reporter asked how many observations they hoped for, Higgins spontaneously replied, “Ten thousand.”
“I just remember thinking, ‘Oh my gosh,’” Young says. “But to play along with the competition, I said, ‘Well then, we want 10,001.’”
To their surprise, 1,000 observers posted 19,800 sightings, just a few shy of the organizers’ brash prediction. (L.A. won the contest.) And people from other states started asking how they could get involved too.
Word spread through social media and in 2017, 16 cities signed up. The following year, 68 cities from 17 countries did the same. To make it more manageable, Young and Higgins whittled the CNC down to four days of observations held in late April each year, followed by photo uploading and identification by knowledgeable members of the iNaturalist community and the announcement of the results a week later.
COVID-19, which triggered a lockdown a few weeks before the 2020 CNC, threatened to halt the event. In-person gatherings—hailed by many as the best part—shifted to individual sightings and Zoom meetings, and competition gave way to collaboration, with no designated “winner.” But instead of a steep drop in numbers, late signups poured in from people antsy to do something outdoors. And, says Young, “We had more participants than ever that year, which was pretty amazing.”
That was also the year that a high school student in Virginia discovered a salamander not seen in his county in 40 years and believed to be extinct—just one example of how important the findings can be, Young says. The data is often used in major research projects that also help local governments protect rare and endangered species and eradicate invasive, destructive ones.
In 2021, many cities chose to stick with the collaborative model, with some adding local competitions just for fun. A total of 1,270,000 observations were made in 419 sites worldwide, including Asheville, North Carolina; Blacksburg, Virginia; and Chattanooga, Knoxville and Johnson City in Tennessee. The 2022 roster also includes Georgia and Kentucky.
There are two things that make the CNC unique in a sea of citizen science projects, Young points out. For one thing, participants across the globe are making observations at the same time during “the biggest biodiversity observation gathering event in the world.”
And unlike most nature-sighting projects, it focuses on dense urban areas. “It’s not just about going out and finding those beautiful, unique wildflowers,” Young says. “It’s about finding those little flowers that are coming up between the cracks in your sidewalks. It’s really about connecting people to the local nature and giving them time to slow down and explore and be curious and to really see how many species are around you, wherever you are.”
The 2022 City Nature Challenge runs April 29-May 2, with results to be announced May 9. To get involved, see citynaturechallenge.org for an organizer near you.
The story above first appeared in our March / April 2022 issue. For more like it subscribe today or log in with your active BRC+ Membership. Thank you for your support!