City Nature Challenge 2022

seems like CNC was pretty smooth this year, at least in terms of system stability. 1.5 million observations so far makes it the biggest CNC yet.

5 Likes

I’ll second that. Have been hugely impressed, working around our loadshedding slots too! Can count on the fingers of one hand, how often I got, wait a moment we are too busy warnings from iNat!

2 Likes

Sure! Here you go:

https://waterpigs.co.uk/inat/cnc-la-2022.html
https://waterpigs.co.uk/inat/cnc-la-2022-priority.html

Looks like there’s a lot of potential first local observations which need more IDs!

Mallard has overtaken Common Dandelion.

1 Like

Volunteered at a local CNC event in NYC; was happy to see some kids in attendance eager to learn how to iNat and record observations. For the most part everyone seemed to get a hang of how to use the app pretty quickly (most of the initial confusion involved distinguishing between wild and cultivated plants). We were also visited by an Osprey circling overhead, which was very exciting!

5 Likes

I did a lot of Unknown IDs my first year (2020) and it was very rewarding, especially seeing them appear in my Notifications as they reached Research Grade. I also learned a lot about iNaturalist by doing so.

If anyone is thinking they’re not an expert and can’t help out with IDs, check for Unknowns and start working… Just marking things as “Bird” or “Flowering Plant” can help guide them to more expert identifiers and RG. It can also help new users learn that very general IDs are OK so they can do for themselves in future.

9 Likes

Could not agree more. Problem is that my image was showing the choices of Species Flowering plants, Genus Unkown (note spelling), and Subgenus Uncertain… further pushing them into a corner of iconic taxa unknown… The last two are inactive taxa, not sure what the status of the first is.

Ha, I made the species count go down actually, because the miss-identifications I disagreed with outnumbered the ones I refined.

3 Likes

I have a male mallard who appears to have lost his mate and is now hanging around my boat. What can I do?

They finished pairing here now, with some males still harassing other couples, so if he doesn’t find a couple this year likely he’ll need to wait till the next year, if this bird is hanging around your boat it’s fine as long as you don’t mind it and it feeds normally.

1 Like

Yeah, Patrick did great work getting us prepped for this! Sorry for some of the downtimes earlier this year but I’m pretty sure that really helped us, especially when it comes to loading large projects.

4 Likes

Just got the official results from the CNC organizers. It’s official: Common Dandelion reclaims its crown as the most observed species.

Also, my plucky little CNC was #64 in terms of per capita observations. We had two people share 3 observations and 3 of us combined to share 247.

Proud of my little group.

5 Likes

Can anyone explain why the species totals on the City Nature Challenge website are so much fewer than the totals on the equivalent iNat groups? For example, the fair city of Nottingham, UK observed 792 species in the iNat project, but on Collective Results 2022 – City Nature Challenge only 694. The CNC’s new overlords in La Paz (huge congrats by the way!) observed 4658 species in their project, but are only(!) credited with 4344 on the website. These are pretty big discrepancies.

Maybe main site counts only species? As iNat shows leaf taxa as species too.

2 Likes

Ah, that’s probably on the right track. When I try to replicate Nottingham’s numbers I get a fair bit less than CNC says by only including species - so maybe it’s something like ‘family or better’ counts. Thanks!

1 Like

@fffffffff is correct - umbrella projects count only species, individual collection projects count “leaves”. You can see more about those two types of counts here.

3 Likes

I moved this discussion to #general so I can put #city-nature-challenge back into hibernation.

1 Like

Thanks, I can replicate the numbers now. It’s a real shame that things don’t count for CNC unless they are identified to species. It makes reams of taxa not worth observing (for competitive purposes). It was not the case last year.

My understanding is that the CNC organizers use the “species” count on each city’s collection project page when tallying numbers. Or at least they have in the past. So the umbrella project might not show it, but the “official” results should.

I’ve no idea what the umbrella project does - I’ve not looked at it. I’m comparing the individual projects with the results on the City Nature Challenge website. It appears that in previous years the results are the same. But this year they are much fewer on CNC, matching the ‘species only’ count.