As I am sure most people reading this are aware by now, this year’s CNC event has caused a lot of disruption and frustration for many iNat users and curators. In the interests of being proactive and solution-seeking, I thought I’d put together a post compiling the exact issues, and potential actions…

[image] graysquirrel: Casual observations should not be allowed. Any regional projects that include casual observations should be excluded from the overall challenge. This will allow falsified observations to be removed from the challenge, and reduce the incentive for adding them. This one is ve…

[image] thebeachcomber: anyone who tries to claim that you cannot find myriad wild organisms in even the most urbanised areas probably needs to do some more observing themselves. Exactly! I’ve found several first-on-iNat observations from the most urban areas around me. Manicured landscaping…

I’ve done a lot of CNC IDing in previous years, concentrating on certain areas where there are lots of observations and very few IDers. This year I swore I was going to ignore the whole thing, but got sucked in somehow. But I am a bit over cultivated plants, and the weird IDs given to those cultivat…

Both iNat and CNC need to move away from vanity numbers and quantity - a million obs in one day. wow. underwhelm. :sob: Turn the focus to quality. Looking for supposed extinct. Confirming a small population of. First obs (an HONEST first). Set up some careful targets that EVERY project can aim at -…

Thank you for this thoughtful summary of the issues around the CNC and the suggestions for improving it. I’d like to respond to each of your suggestions. CNC organizers should take a more active role. Absolutely! I’m assuming you mean the local organizers here, not the global organizers? How, exact…

On the competition aspect of the thing: CNC results shouldn’t be set on stone as the IDing process is endless. A city might lose or gain a new species months after the event was over. Places with low ID activity such as non-european non-North America areas need several weeks before all the major ID…

[image] thebeachcomber: Inclusion of casual obviously ‘won’, and one of the main reasons used by proponents of inclusion was that some cities are very heavily built up and urbanised, so participants may find it difficult to find wild organisms, and that interacting with cultivated/captive specie…

[image] graysquirrel: 1. Overwhelming numbers of falsified observations, including: Users uploading photos that are not their own (this is the biggest issue); Uploading old photos with the date/location falsified so they become eligible for the project; Uploading the same photo dozens of times…

City Nature Challenge - issues & suggestions for improvement

General

graysquirrel May 12, 2025, 3:08am 2

(reserving in case I run out of space above)

How can local organizers make the CNC better?

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City Nature Challenge - issues & suggestions for improvement

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