Penguins don’t grow on trees! 
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I did this year, the first year that I participated. Sunday and Monday, I went out at an hour of the afternoon when I am usually “in for the evening,” just to ensure that I had observations on each of the four days.
Why? I thought CNC was mainly about numbers of species? If a given species is already well represented in my team’s area, I will tend to pass it up to look for one that I have not seen represented yet.
Agreed. For Coastal North Carolina, the project parameters intentionally excluded Human, Domestic Dog, and Domestic Cat, presumably because the organizers know that people would use those to inflate their numbers.
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but they do live down the road from me. Need another visit to Boulders for an obs.
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The global organizers of the CNC decided to exclude Human, Domestic Dog, and Domestic Cat from every CNC area this year.
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I have a normal practice of bioblitzing (ie all & sundry) any area that I go to but when the CNC is on I make the following tweaks
- do any bioblitzing within the designated boundary of the CNC
- maximize my days by arranging to have nothing else on (if I can help it)
- check for areas within the CNC where it looks like people are not going (hopefully this will increase the species numbers). In Greater Adelaide, South Australia there is still a lot of areas without any observations.
- set time aside to go through the Unknowns and tag people as needed. I like to make sure that I go through all of them at least once.
- advertise on my social media accounts that it is on
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I try to observe and ID more, but sometimes life happens. I’ve been out of town for a couple, and this year I ran into a hard stop due to exhaustion and life (plumbing failed behind a wall in our bathroom Sunday night and it’s been a mess).
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Nope. I typically only photograph organisms I find particularly interesting, rather than trying to do a “blitz” of everything I see. Don’t want to clutter up my photo gallery with pics of every weed, house fly, or dead worm on the pavement I come across. I already have to spend too much time deleting unwanted photos as it is. I also don’t care for online “challenges,” no matter where they originate
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I go crazy and try to fill in the gaps along my regular ecological survey routes. Each CNC I find some species I’ve not seen before, and chip away at mapping out everything living in these habitats.
I also probably spend more time identifying than normal, to help deal with the influx.
I like to carefully label all my observations with annotations and observations fields and add them to relevant projects. I have to stop doing that in the frantic rush of the CNC, which I don’t like. I’d rather have 4-days for observing and 2-weeks for uploading and identifications. Still, rules and rules and it’s an amazing event that’s great fun to be part of.
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I didn’t really know it was a thing, either, until recently.
What happens on Sunday, anyway?
You have until Sunday evening to help ID. If you don’t have a local project, you can pick one, anywhere, and help them move from Unknown to Needs ID to RG.
Global project is a good place to start.
Or wander the world and pick a local project where you will come up against https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/large-numbers-of-falsified-observations-for-this-years-city-nature-challenge/64547/24
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I definitely pay more attention to things I would otherwise dismiss as boring – as a result I have found more plant pathogen species on plants that I wouldn’t otherwise look at as often.
To answer your question, I went from 1 obs per week to 119 obs in 3 days. This is a new high score for me. I was photographing everything that moved no matter the cost. There is no chill till the challenge is fulfilled.
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To expand on what @DianaStuder said, Sunday is the City Nature Challenge’s deadline for identifying the observations from this event, before they announce their “official” results on Monday, May 5.
As far as iNaturalist is concerned, there is never a deadline for identifications. If it takes years to identify something, as it often does, it’s still good!
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This year was the first year that Málaga participated, so I promised the organiser to do at least one day. Usually once a week I travel somewhere to make observations. My main goals still are keeping up the streak and trying to find 1000 RG animal species during this year. I did take a lot of photos of plants as well on Friday in Málaga. Saturday ad Sunday I was together with a friend who wanted to find some special plants - and we did. Those days “only” counted for the global project. On Monday I wanted to resume my usual moth-walk, but then the whole of Spain had a power-blackout and before it got dark I went into the patio to take at least some photos of random organisms.
Usually I like to process my photos before uploading (crop, maybe adjust light and sharpness) and afterwards annotate observations, which I didn’t do this time. I went through the few Málaga observations and IDed some (except for those of the organiser, who has > 17000 obs and 0 IDs). I realised I don’t have to be sad that the CNC is not a big thing here in Spain.
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I push harder than usual to get more observations and I make sure I go to different locations to get an increased number of species in a small amount of time. I tend to leave any IDing until after the picture taking part of the event but other than that my IDing doesn’t change. I’m pretty sure I didn’t look at the forum during, but maybe. It did feel like all my usual responsibilities did take a back seat to the event.
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CNC doesn’t change my observing. It changes my identifying. More rushed, more likely to label a cultivated plant cultivated the first time I see it. More likely to ID plants from La Paz.
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No
I used to be very busy but now I am over games, pushing volumes and leader boards.
I’ve got deadlines at work and can’t take any added pressure.
If you enjoy the CNC, I am really happy for you.
Maybe the main reason is that I found other challenges with no geographic nor time limits. One of them is finding widespread taxa, with no or minimal iNat presence, in the field or other people’s observation. Focusing on one genus at a time, I learn more and I can do better identifications and more of them. It is inevitable that my approach means that I miss the CNC deadlines, which make me a bit disappointed.
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Yes, it is a little bit different than my normal habits. I love the blitzes. I meet up with people who are willing to spend a whole day just recording everything we see, not something that often happens. I take many more photos than I usually do, not waiting for something special to show up. Finding unexpected special things as a result.
I am not worried about the ‘gamification’ aspect. I love that people are engaging with nature, and I love making ID’s and hopefully get some people interested in participating and noticing more during the rest of the year.
It is not about the numbers, but enjoying numbers and counts are not wrong either. Getting excited about any aspect of these blitzes is good, in my opinion.
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I live in a city that is not participating in CNC and I have largely decided to ignore it and keep puttering away at spring bee observations. I am about a month behind, so it will be a while until I get around to the CNC pile.
I fall into the group of those who are fairly critical of CNC and its impacts on iNat as implemented in many cities.
I also want to note that as someone in a non-participating region, the CNC leaves me feeling somewhat marginalized as an observer: because a lot of IDers are understandably focusing on their cities right now, it means that it is even less likely than usual that anyone will look at my observations from this period anytime soon. I actually considered not doing any observing at all so as not to make the pile that IDers are already dealing with even larger than it already is. The problem with this is that late April is precisely the period when many interesting plants and insects start appearing, so it is precious time that I want to be out documenting whatever I can find. But it is rather discouraging to know if I find anything that is particularly exciting or even just something where I would like feedback, I will probably be waiting a very long time for IDs. I suppose I could wait a few weeks and post my observations later when they might get more attention, but it seems a bit unfair that I should find myself making such strategic calculations at all.
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I joined the global project partly for this reason (and because of FOMO).
However, now that a few days have passed since CNC observation phase, about 23% (65/280) of my observations uploaded between last Friday and today have reached Research Grade which seems normal?
Overall, <40% of my observations ever seem to reach RG.
Neither of the cities I live in (despite one having a few active iNat users) has ever participated, which has left me feeling a bit unmotivated about uploading as well. A few of my observations are still in the backlog.
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