Wanted to let people know about changes to collection and umbrella projects that were just released, in case you missed them.
Just as a note, more people would probably see important updates in blog posts if these blog posts were displayed for all users regardless of their language settings.
This is all super helpful, thank you!
Can I ask a question - what are the guidelines around joining the larger projects for un-registered cities. Will this duplicate observation data if some of the cities you conduct observations in are participating? Trying to clarify whether this is a ‘choose one or the other but not both’ type of situation
Nope, your observations won’t be double-counted, so it’s fine to join the Global Project for obs you might make outside of a CNC boundary, as well as making observations for a particular CNC project! Have fun!
Please teach participants, that they can come close to plants. They (normally) don’t bite and don’t run away. ;)
With every additional meter of distance, the ID becomes more difficult.
Thanks.
But we get nice pictures of ‘shoe with … caterpillar ?’ Will take another year or two to get the Not Wild is not counted to stick. Have only needed to flag one observer so far.
Эх… погода испортилась. Не получится толком раскочегариться.
is there a reason CNC is hosted once a year with the kind-of-bad-for-both-hemispheres date of early spring/late autumn instead of having a CNC north and CNC south with summer dates for both? i’m in southern ontario which isnt even particularly high latitude but it’s still really chilly here (6C today) and a lot of plants/buggies aren’t awake yet which is a major bummer.
That is why we have a Great Southern Bioblitz, and the date moves a little each year so everyone gets a turn. But Southern hemisphere. With our mediterranean climate, high summer is less appealing - plants are aestivating.
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/great-southern-bioblitz-2025-umbrella 2025 was in October
The reason is that the CNC started as a competition between Los Angeles and San Francisco, where late April/early May is a nice time of year. Now that the CNC is really global, there’s no perfect time of year for everyone. Summer here is winter there; dry season here is wet season there; nice weather where I am means black flies or mosquitoes or ticks or all three. If the CNC doesn’t work for your area, feel free to ignore it entirely.
Yes:
- In 1970, advertising genius Julian Koenig invented the name Earth Day, and set the date on his birthday — April 22
- Earth Day was originally proposed for the vernal equinox on March 21, which would have been even worse for a bioblitz!
- In 2016, the first City Nature Challenge was held the week before Earth Day. The idea was to ride the wave of environmental awareness around Earth Day. Spend a few days celebrating nature in your city, and end by celebrating nature for the whole world! (with Earth Day, on April 22)
- There are some details that make the origin story more complicated: April was declared to be “Citizen Science Month”, some birthdays of famous conservation people also coincidentally happen in April, etc, but I have tried to ignore these distractions and coincidences, and get to the original reason.
With regard to biodiversity surveying, it doesn’t really matter when CNC takes place, since there are bioblitzes almost every day somewhere in the world, for many different reasons. Some bioblitzes target everyone (like the CNC), and some bioblitzes only involve experts doing the surveying, with more narrowly focused taxa, more limited geography, etc. Everyone is free to participate as much or as little as they like!
I’m also from Southern Ontario, but I’ve been in Alberta for the last 20 years. Late April is often late winter in Calgary. During the current CNC, we have had blizzards and -12°C with the windchill.
thanks this is very informative! i still wish it was later in the year haha. considering it’s a global challenge it feels very usa centric, but i understand being related to earth day and stuff.
i’m also from calgary and i remember how it would usually snow on or around my birthday each year, at the end of may. very uncool place to live imo 
Now we can filter for obs count ascending, and find the projects with very few obs. Is there a way to filter, to build an URL to find for example - projects with only 1 to 5 obs ? I would really like to encourage the marathon runners who JUST make the cutoff by entering and completing. Tierra del Fuego (only one project member but obs is already RG 100% achieved ;~) !!
It’s all very well to say that casual observations will not be included in the City Nature Challenge.
But there is little chance that more than a fraction of the not wild observations will be cleaned up.
As an identifier I dread the CNC because of the high number of participants who go to their local botanic gardens, zoo, aquarium or their own home garden and shoot as many plants and animals as they can to dump them on iNat.
It’s impossible to mark all that I find, as it’s common to see 50, 100 or more of these from a single observer and there are so many observers that do this.
iNat needs to come up with a quick and simple way for identifiers to mark large batches of these junk observations as casual.
I’m skeptical about the value to iNat of having so many records of negligible value dumped on it.
There’s no way to just
Observations need to be marked for some reason which makes them casual. In this case, I’m assuming the reason would be captive/cultivated, but I think it’s important to note that there’s always a specific reason for an observation to be casual, not just because another user judges that something is a
There are pretty efficient workflows for marking observations as captive using the Identify modal and its keyboard shortcuts or the Universal Metadata tool.
I’m talking about people who’ll post 50, 100 or more pictures of plants in pots, greenhouses or garden settings, or fish in aquariums.
I’ve spent the day identifying and half of that was wasted on these.
I’ve been identifying for 5 years but am not familiar with efficient workflows with keyboard shortcuts or a universal metadata tool. Where can I find information on these?
You can filter for that person - then sweep thru to Mark ALL as Reviewed. (Or with X as below)
Do you ID from the Identify modal ? That is deliberately set up for keyboard shortcuts (click X for Cultivated)
From an historical dataset perspective, especially one laid down in a time of (geologically) rapid climate change, having a global BioBlitz during a transitional season phenologically speaking will be very useful. Think of the CNC 100 years from now. What do you think you will be observed late April in Calgary?
No .. I’ve not been able to make it fit my style.
I search for a broad taxon group for the area I’m focusing on and open the individual observations I’m interested in.
If I find one that looks like it’s captive, I open that users observations and often find many more that way.