City Nature Challenge 2023 Success
Thank you to everyone who has participated and made this year’s City Nature Challenge a huge success! From April 28th to May 1st, our campus was busy with people learning and having fun in nature while documenting Chattanooga’s biodiversity! Across the globe, more than 66,000 people made more than 1.8 million observations, including 2,570 rare, endangered, or threatened species. Even more exciting news is that La Paz, Bolivia won the challenge for the second consecutive year with over 126,000 observations—congratulations! Check out the full results here.
The City Nature Challenge is an annual bio-blitz-style competition where cities compete against each other to see who can make the most observations of nature, who can find the most species, and who can engage the most people. Every April, this global community science project kicks off in communities around the world. People from all walks of life use the iNaturalist platform to find and document plants, animals, and other organisms in urban areas.
If you haven’t heard of it, iNaturalist is a social network for nature enthusiasts, allowing anyone to contribute to biodiversity science by sharing their observations. Using their mobile app, you can easily photograph any interesting plants or animals you encounter—on the trail or in your own backyard–-and have them identified by naturalists. You’ll never have to wonder what flower, plant, or bird you are looking at again! For each species observed, iNaturalist can compile a vast array of data, including photos, a map of locations where the species has been spotted, and links to many different resources to learn more about it. You can also check out their website to explore this data.
Started in 2016 as a friendly citizen science competition between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the City Nature Challenge has grown in scale every year. Now, with more than 500 participating cities in 46 different countries, CNC has morphed into an international effort to document urban biodiversity across the globe. This year, the number of distinct species identified globally reached 57.2 thousand! Why is this important? Knowing what species are in your city and where they are helps scientists study and protect them, but the only way to do that is by all of us—scientists, land managers, and the community—working together to find and document nature in our area. By participating in Chattanooga’s CNC, not only do you have a lot of fun while learning more about plants and animals, but you also help scientists understand nature better and make Chattanooga an even greener place to live, work and play! To hear more about how the CNC encourages communities to appreciate and understand the nature that surrounds them, check out the 2023 CNC recap video.
See some of the recent iNaturalist observations made on Reflection Riding’s campus below.
2023 marks the fourth year that Reflection Riding has led the charge for the CNC in Chattanooga. On our campus, the weekend of the competition was packed with lots of fun programming to give community members opportunities to observe as much flora and fauna as possible. A big thank you to Chattanooga Times Free Press, the Tennessee Aquarium, and the City of Chattanooga for sponsoring the event! We did several iNaturalist training sessions with Outdoor Chattanooga to gear up for the event and Kevin Calhoun with the Tennessee Aquarium led a fun herpetology walk during the challenge. Participants also got to join in on night hikes, bird banding, sky fishing, animal tracking, pond surveys, a Campfire Concert, and more! Our Greater Chattanooga Area team had 275 participants who logged 3,612 observations of 1,152 species. This means we beat last year’s record of 3,077 observations—way to go Chattanooga!
We are already looking forward to next year’s challenge—it will take place from April 26th-29th, so mark your calendars! If you haven't participated in the CNC in past years, we’d love to have you come out in 2024 and represent Chattanooga! With your help, we can smash all our previous year’s records! In the meantime, download the iNaturalist app and join the Reflection Riding Arboretum and Nature Center Project to participate year-round in sharing your observations. You can also get your kids involved with Seek, a partner app of iNaturalist designed to be a fun and kid-safe way to learn about and explore nature. It’s never too early to get kids outside and curious about nature!